Modernism, Post Modernism and the Problem of the Visual in Afro American Culture : Michele Wallace

Sadhana Shanbhag

1124123

Paragraph 1

Topic Sentence (TS)

In 1954 in the case of Brown versus The Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled

that segregated schools were inherently unequal, discriminatory and illegal.

Supporting Sentence

Made by NAACP , the case include finding by two black PhD's Kenneth & Mamie

Clarke who used a doll and colouring test to find out how racism and segregation

damaged self esteem of black children.

Key Word: - segregation.

Paragraph 2

TS

There has been much debate in the fields of psychology and sociology and about the

meaning o Clarke's research, most of t focused upon the scientific validity of testing

methods.

Supporting Sentence

It is not unusual for media to refer back to this research as evidence and racism is an

unambiguously deprivational experience while ignoring w hat the visual implications of

such findings might be.

Key Word: - Scientific Validity

Paragraph 3

TS

The documentary interpreted this information as corroboration of the fact that blacks are

still comparatively poor and disenfranchised in comparison to whites

No Keyword

Paragraph 4

TS

Poverty and powerlessness feeds a child's perception of what it means to have black skin,

but his process is much more complex than a direct correlation could encompass.

Supporting Sentence

The societies already operative evaluation of images further inscribe by skin color that

affects the child's opinion of race.

No Keyword

Paragraph 5

TS

The absence of back images in the reflection of social mirror, which such programmatic

texts invariably construct, could and did produce the void and the dread of racial

questions that Clarke fond in the fifties particularly in the northern black children who

already were attending integrated schools.

Supporting Sentence

On the other hand, southern children who attended segregated schools displayed less

ambivalence.

Keyword: - Image.

Paragraph 6

TS

We all know in our hearts as any mere child in our midst today must know that

in "nigger," "black," and "Schwartze," are often used interchangeably in our language to

mean an abject "other," and yet we persist in denying it just as the NAACP, Kenneth &

Mamie Clarke and the Supreme Court denied it in 1954.

Supporting Sentence

Donald Newman's charcoal drawings and Jackie Mason's reference of a mayoral

candidate as a schwartze and a sizeable downtown New York controversies showed that

this charade which has become one of the principal tenets of bourgeois humanism that

color is an innately trivial matter.

Keyword:-Color

Paragraph 7

TS

How one is seen as black and therefore what one sees in a white world is always already

crucial to ones existence as afro American.

Supporting Sentence

The very markers that reveal you to the rest of the world are visual. Not being seen

by those who don't want to see you because they are racist, what Ralf Ellison called

Invisibility.

Keyword:- Invisibility

Paragraph 8

TS

Among other things afro Americans have not produced because they have been prevented

from doing so by intra racial pain and outside intervention, a tradition in the visual arts as

vital and compelling to other Americans as the afro American tradition in music.

Supporting Sentence

The necessity which seems to persist of its own volition for drawing parallels or

alignments between afro American music and everything else cultural among afro

Americans stifles and represses most of the potential for understanding in afro American

Culture.

Keyword Positive/Negative Seen of Instruction.

Paragraph 9

It appears that the only reason black artists aren't as widely accepted as black writers is

because shifts in art historical judgment results in extraordinary economic contingencies.

Supporting Sentence

The closed economic nepotism of the art world creates a situation in which artists of a

colour, face and industry wide restraint of trade limiting the ability to show and sell their

work.

Keyword:- Economic

Paragraph 10

TS

If black writers had to rely on the kinds of people that determine the value of art and had

to be accepted into rich white people homes none of us would have heard of the great

black writer.

No Supporting Sentence

No Key Word

Paragraph 11 – 14 context "history of the author's fascination with the visual"

Summary

Growing up in the author constantly found herself in a world where though speaking

of race was an embarrassing topic, there was no a single visual reference of black .

Television rarely had a black face, comics and magazines had no mention of the word

race. On a visit to art galleries of France and Italy, there were only endless streams of

white faces

Key word :-Race and Visual

Paragraphs 15 – 17 context of Black Aesthetic

The author finds that the whole concept of self-consciousness developed by Kenneth and

Mamie Clark was something that would later be called "Black Aesthetic" but for a very

long time was confined to the problem of not liking dolls the same colour as yourself ,

unless carefully educated to do so. Also citing her mother example, Faith Ringgold

obsessed herself trying to take seriously her relationship to the tradition of Western

painting, before she became interested in the questions of a Black Aesthetic.

Key Word: - Black Aesthetic

Paragraph 18

TS

According to Raymond Williams, hegemony is a process that relies upon the mechanisms

of tradition and canons of old Masters in order to waylay the utopian desires that are

potentially embodied in cultural production

Supporting Sentence

The underlying structure of tradition lies in wait behind contemporary variations which

are selective in favour of maintaining the dominance of a brutal status quo as much as

one may try to subvert it.

Key Word: - Tradition

Paragraph 19

TS

I cannot recall a time during which I didn't perceive Western Art and Western Culture

as a problem in ways that seem to me now akin to the manner in which Modernism, Post

Modernism and Feminism raises such Problems

No Supporting Sentence

No Key Word

Paragraph 20

TS

It was widely interpreted among a black Middle class intelligentsia in the '50s

and '60s , "they," or white Euro – American high Modernism, had borrowed from "us,"

the African peoples of the world, even if "they" were incapable of admitting it.

Supporting Sentence

The debate was precisely situated in the paradox that Picasso, Cubism and subsequent

Modernists had borrowed heavily from African Art,

Key Word: - Borrowed

Paragraph 21

TS

My Interest in Modernism only accelerated once I had become knowledgeable enough

about the visual and literary production of both Afro-Americans and white Europeans and

Americans in this century to know that Modernism took place in the Afro-American as

well as in the white American –European milieu

Supporting Sentence

"Critical Signification," is an attempt to describe the mechanical relationship between

Afro-American culture and Euro-American Culture

Supporting Sentence 2

This Relationship can also usefully be described as dialogical, or as one of intertexuality

Key Word:- Relationship

Paragraph 22

TS

But the problem remains the unilateral unwillingness of Euro-American culture to admit

and acknowledge its debt, or even relationship, to African and Afro-American culture.

Supporting Sentence

In fact this problem, has such a long and convoluted history that its enunciation has

become one of the telling features of Afro-American Modernism

Supporting Sentence 2

One of the early practioners of Afro-American literary Modernism , Ralph Ellison, even

gave it a name: invisibility

Key Word:- Problem

Paragraph 23

TS

According to the myth of the blackness in Ellison's Invisible man, it is the opposite of

whiteness, or it is so much "the same" that it is invisible

Supporting Sentence

Both dynamics are, infact , aspects of this "invisibility's" inevitable and structural binary

opposition.

Supporting Sentence 2

Invisibility, a visual metaphor, is then employed as a way of presenting a variety of

responses to racism and cultural apartheid.

Key Word:- Invisibility

Paragraph 24

There is a problem of being the patriarch of a black family whose role must be defined in

opposition to that of the patriarch of the white family.

Supporting Sentence

Myth constructs' the black family on a model contrasting with the Freudian/Oedipal/

Modernist drama of individuation

Supporting Sentence 2

The most psychologically damaging residual is that the subjectivity of the black woman

becomes unimaginable

Key Word :- Subjectivity

Paragraph 25

TS

In Euro-American Modernism, and in Afro-American Modernisms, as well , for that

matter, the position of the "other" is as unitary and as incapable of being occupied

by categories more diverse than "women and blacks" as was the formerly unified ,

omniscient subject from which it split

No Supporting Sentence

Keyword :- "Other"

Paragraph 26

TS

The difference in motivation is only a function of the extent to which the performance

and consumption of these texts are interrogated by a critical discourse emanating from

white, black ( brown) feminist and Afro-Americanism discourses.

Supporting Sentence

The relative scarcity of such interrogation in the media and in academia is as telling as

the relative scarcity of a multicultural "object" presence in the various field of visual

production, from museum administration to film

Key Word :- Motivation

Paragraph 27

TS

But we move from the Afro-American Modernist novel par excellence to the Afro-

American Post modernist novel par excellence , Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, there is

an interesting black female character who comes in view,

Supporting Sentence

It is the dancer who shares African art, and with Picasso and the Cubists , a mutual

location is Paris of the '20s.

Keyword :- Juxtaposition

Paragraph 28

TS

When one arrives at the Post Modern scene, marked as it is by reproduction and

simulation, the rampant exploitation of international capitalism, not to mention much

speculation regarding the death of the subject, the death of history and the total blurring

of lines between pop culture and high culture, spin-offs of the Josephine Baker model

proliferate.

Supporting Sentence

There was also a popularity in Europe of an ethnographic photography issuing from the

process of the colonial/anthropological exploitation of a third world Asia and Africa that

proceeded and overlapped with a burgeoning interest in Europe in African and Oceanic

art which is really about an interest in other ways of seeing and looking that had not

before occurred to the west

Keyword: - Exploitation

Paragraph 29

TS

In this way, representation of black women with large and fatty buttocks came to signify

not only black women but all other categories of women , such as prostitutes, who were

thought to be as sexually wonton as black women

No Supporting Sentence

Keyword :- Sexually Wonton

Paragraph 30

TS

Les Demoiselles might be seen as illustrating the occasional advantage of art over

institutionalized history or science in that it seems to represent the desire to both reveal

and repress the scene of appropriation as a conjunction of black/female bodies and white

culture- a scene of negative instruction between black and white art or black and white

culture

Supporting Sentence

Gillman describes Hottentot Venus (by Picasso) as prolegomena to intersection issues of

race and sexuality in Les Demoiselles D'Avignon of five years later.

Keyword:- Prolegomena

Paragraph 31

TS

Unlike the positive scene of instruction of Afro-American and Euro-American music

in which mutual influence and intertexuality is acknowledged , in the negative scene of

instruction of Afro-American art and Euro-American art the exchange is disavowed and

disallowed .

Supporting Sentence

And, in more or less simultaneous with this subtle but effective metamorphosis, the black

Aesthetic emerges as the unambivalent, uncompromised link-up between Africa and

the "New World" in which Euro-American Influences are superfluous and negligible

No Keyword

Paragraph 32:

TS

Herein lies my opportunity to usher forth new knowledge as Pollock names it in

conceptualizations of the visual in Afro-American culture that would consider the inter

dependency in issues of ethnicity and sex.

Supporting Sentence

This new knowledge would be constituted in the excavation of the black artistic

versus the white artistic experience under the historic heading of modernism and post-

modernism.

Keyword: New knowledge.

Paragraph 33:

TS

What gives modern primitivism any critical import in this cultural revisioning of the

visual that it appears to be an ongoing category in the modernist, post-modernist and

feminist discourses, a fundamental way of discounting the blackness of the occasional

black artist whose accepted within the ranks while rejecting the category of black artist in

general.

No Supporting Sentence.

Keyword: Modernist primitivism.

Paragraph 34:

TS

This disembodiment with its attendant disexualization of black literature and high culture

occurs in response to the over sexualization of black images in white mass culture.

Supporting Sentence:

If this process of desexualization and deprimitivization had not been in the black high

culture within Afro-American studies, there would be many more black female artists,

writers and singers.

Keyword: disexualization.

Paragraph 35:

TS

On the other hand, the absence of black voices in the debate over Primitivism show The

Museum Modern Art in 1984 was no accident.

Supporting Sentence:

Therefore, it should come as no surprise that in a few isolated instances so called

primitive art would be as good as western art for the people who made these objects as

people too.

Keyword: Primitive Art.

Paragraph 36:

TS

Yet I am not convinced that minority artists of the colour in the west who in some

sense along with African and third world artists, the rightful heirs to the debate around

Primitivism will ever surface up in discussion.

No Supporting Sentence.

No Keyword.

Paragraph 37:

TS

Black criticism was blocked from the discussions of modernism which are defined as

exclusively white by intricate and insidious cooperation of art galleries, museums and

also, blocked from any discussion of primitivism which has been colonized beyond

recognition in the space of the international and global museum.

No Supporting Sentence.

No Keyword.

Paragraph 38:

TS

Primitivism becomes the magical commodity whereby white European art will

appropriate the ritual function of tribal art and resist the process, which the museum

space makes inevitable of being reduced to a lifeless commodity.

No Supporting Sentence.

Keyword: Magical commodity.

Paragraph 39:

TS

And yet finally, there is only an implied entry way here for the artist or the critic of

colour who is not a member of the post colonial intellectual elite suffer the problems of

modern and cultural identity. Perhaps more than anyone and the unified subject of this

and another analysis of the post modern never mind the modern continues to render us as

invisible and silent.

Keyword: Minorities.

Paragraph 40:

TS

The so called discovery of tribal objects by Modernism is analogous to an equally

dubious discovery of the new world by European colonization.

Supporting sentence 1:

What was there was not, infact, "discovered but rather appropriated or stolen".

Supporting sentence 2:

In other words, both European and non-European cultures were transformed by "new"

and closer relationship to one another in the new world.

Keyword: Proximity.

Paragraph 41:

TS

While the most concrete sign of that something new is generally referred to as Post

Modernism, unfortunately this move usually carries along with it the inscription of

modernism's apartheid.

Supporting sentence:

There is another sign just as indicated of novelty which is best represented by the cultural

contributions of Afro-Americans to popular culture.

Keyword: Modernism's apartheid.

The Other Story : Rasheed Araeen

Amol Kadam

1124110

Paragraph 1

This is a unique story. It is a story that has never been told .But because it only existed in fragments,each asserting its own autonomous existence .... context of collective history. A story of those men and women who defied their 'otherness'.

My own struggle as an avant-garde artist (in the west)......without this struggle it would not have been possible.....recognize the importance of this story. It is not the only story."to tell other stories than the official sequential or ideological ones produced by institutions of power".

Paragraph 2

My aims are exploratory rather than critical. The exploration must take into consideration the change that has taken place in the world since the last war,in particular the mass emigration of people from the Africa,Asia and the Caribbean to the West......challenged the old social structures of the colonizer and the colonized.

Decolonization across the world,with its specific articulation in the metropolis.

Paragraph 3

It would be a mistake to emphasize only the socio-political determinants of the mass emigration.....understand the actual aims of individual artists who left their countries to fulfill artistic ambitions abroad.

We should recognize the peculiarity of these ambitions.........not merely by success in the market..........but by the artist's entry into the history of art.

This will allow the work to be seriously discussed and recognized for its historical significance. Dominant ideology of imperial civilization....racial or cultural differences of the colonized constitutes the 'Otherness'.Other is a part of history as long as it stays outside master narrative.

Paragraph 4

Would it be possible to inscribe.......within the master narrative of modern art history?

Unresolvable contradiction. A slap in the face of Hegelian metaphysics.

History of art still being written according to Hegelian historical framework. Arbitrary removal of other cultures which are not western art.

Paragraph 5

Hegel looks at Indian art and inferiorizes it comparing with Greek art. Hegel removes India from any dynamic history .......helps establish supremacy of Western culture.

"The Hindo race has proved itself unable to comprehend either persons or events as a part of

continuous history...."

Paragraph 6,7

Art historian John Ruskin,......,did not hesitate to use strong words to belittle other cultures.'The difficulty to distinguish between noble grotesque of these great nations,and the barbarous grotesque of mere savages,as seen in the work of the Hindoo and other Indian nations.....'

As a comparison to Greek art he quotes 'An Indian bull,colossal,elaborately carved.....a type of bad art of all the Earth. We will not ask date as it may rest in the external obscurity of evil art,everywhere and forever. And in comparison to Greek art he quotes 'here is a bit of Dedalus' work,enlarged from a coin not bigger than a shilling......'

Paragraph 8

What do we make of it? Diatribe? Diatribe may be a strong word,but can we consider this an objective view.? What is the basis of this 'objectivity'?

Other than the power of his speech not so much from an intellectual argument but from his consciousness of belonging to the privileged class of British Empire?

Is this objectivity a camouflage to hide the imperial fantasies.

Paragraph 9

John Ruskin not alone in his view. Views not expressed openly. Assumptions and attitudes exist which considers other cultures/people outside modern history.

Attitudes pervasive and intransigent,that the presence of 'others' in modern world seen with suspicion. The question of modernity outdated and gives way to postmodernism.

Paragraph 10

A World History Of Art winner of Mitchell Prize in 1982...represent for the first time all culture in the world equally.

This pluralism ends,in this book,by the end of nineteenth. African/Oceanic culture taken up again only in connection with modernism,development of styles in particular cubism. After this everything non-European disappears. West shines alone,the whole world reflected in its image.

Paragraph 11

This book praised by Kenneth Clark:'Much the best complete history of art....put together'.

It discusses the arts of Asia,Africa,the Americas and the Pacific Islands as well as Europe chronologically .It falls into the established pattern that obscures achievement of other cultures......on the assumption that other people belong to historically receding cultures. Again a recollection Of Hegelian principles,that assumes that the ultimate narrative is the narrative of Western civilization from which others must be excluded.

Paragraph 12

Art history is peculiar in its function as a master narrative,not only is it fundamental in the recognition and legitimation of art ....only discourse which protects its Western territory so rigidly that we find hardly any exception to its Euro-centric rules.

Paragraph 13

We are confronted here by a discourse which is complex and ambivalent.....when the mask of objectivity is lifted,what is revealed is not only a phoney rationalization but a structure that is mythical.

Mythic structure hides the contradictions of imperial society .Its ambivalence ,expressed particularly in its fascination for the others traditions. Reaffirmation of the centrality of Western/white artist in the paradigm of modernism.

Paragraph 14

If art history is an ideological presentation of Western civilization...............logical to produce a narrative which conforms to its assumptions,functions and ambitions.

It would be more fruitful to interrogate the nature of its narrative to reveal underlying myth.

'Myth,as Roland Barthes famously defined it,....nothing more than depoliticized speech consistent with the classical definition of ideology.

Mythic speech is a set of beliefs,attitudes,utterances,texts and artefacts that are themselves constitutive of social reality.

Paragraph 15

The smooth working of the myth had entailed the smooth working of the colonial system by which the imperial metropolis was successfully separated and insulated from thee people of the colonies. But when the chickens began to come home to roost the outer shell of the myth began to crack.

The myth began to crack after the great war. There was grimness in Britain after the prolonged war. The colonies were lost, opposition in power and half-baked ideas of socialism floated around.

Paragraph 16

Europe after the War was in ruins,facing the anguish of unprecedented human death and suffering.

Europe had to rebuild its cities,no roads paved in gold. The beginning of the demystification of imperial greatness on which the whole colonial apparatus had been built.

Paragraph 17

The colonial administration used both the stick and the carrot.

The emergence of the middle class,schools of western education all this to cater to rebuilding the empire. Appearance of a modern consciousness fundamental to anti-colonial struggles. Many artists of the previously colonized nations were also engaged in anti-colonial struggles of their countries.

The situation not the same everywhere.

There were places where there were no schools and traditional activities were not allowed. with change there was the emergence of self-taught artists.

Paragraph 18

The artist also had the double task of dealing with the prevailing situation:on the one hand with traditional structures(tribal/feudal)..........on the other ,with art institutions that were supposedly modern but were in fact extremely conservative.

Formation of radical progressive groups to bring together talented painters, whose common meeting grounds was that their work stood in stark contrast with the imported and orientalized academicism.

Paragraph 19

In India the debate about what is progressive and what is progress........is still not resolved.

Progress was not about rejection of tradition but re-vitalization in terms of 'modern progress'.Rabindranath Tagore calls it a sign of immaturity to produce something that can be labelled as Indian art.

Paragraph 20

Throughout history artists have travelled from one country to another in search of patronage,quite often ending up in a dominant culture.

Picasso,Brancusi,Mondrian arrived in Paris,which was very much part off this tradition.

Independence form the colonizers removed both physical and psychological constraints.Thereby allowing artists to travel to places where they could find recognition.The paradox here is not of chasing the old colonial masters,but lack of modern institutions in their own countries.

Paragraph 21

However,it would be incorrect to conceive the British society as a monolithic power concerned only with its oppresive imperial functions.

There existed a liberal intelligentsia who were ambivalent towards the 'natives'.Section of British people openly showed sympathy for independence movements.

Paragraph 22

It should be understood that England has been marginal in terms of twentieth-century modern movements,since all the important movements before the War took place on the Continent.

London was never an art centre like Paris.This conciousness of marginality and hope of London developing into an international cultural centre that lead to a section of Brtish society to welcome artists from abroad.

Paragraph 23

The artists faced many difficulties in the beginning,no different from those faced by an artist in a new place or country.

These problems might have been compounded because of Britain's imperialistic past within which racism has been rampart.However it would be a mistake to evoke racist bigotry to understand the position of Afro-Asian artists in Britain.

Paragraph 24

However,one is amazed by the kind of support and response which Afro-Asian artists recieved during their successful period.

Many successful artists emerged during this period.the success of F.N.Souza and Avinash Chandra was phenomenal and made some of the British artists envious.Hardly a critic who did not write about them.

Paragraph 25

However,despite all their success they remained the Other,in the sense that their Otherness was constantly evoked as a part of discussion of their work.

There were critics who tried to deal with the problematics of the Otherness,critically and sympathetically not to exclude them from the discourse of modern art but to raise the issue of other cultural traditions in relation to modernism.

Paragraph 26

Such questions posed are posed by Cuban Wifredo Lam,and the Mexican Rutino Tamayo...And they raised with even greater acuteness by the paintings and drawings of Indian Avinash Chandra......Indian to the same degree and the same way as the art of Picasso and Miro is vividly Spanish.

Through Chandra modern art has recieved an Indian injection just as Nehru made an Indian impact on world ideas.

Paragraph 27

W.G Archer was not the only person who was aware of the problem,and in spite of the success of some of these artists,many people knew that there was something not quite right.

Norbert Lynton had this to say:"a few years ago there appeared a book........purporting to present international art scene of our time,ranged geographically from Poland to Yugoslavia westwards to United States and simply omitted everything east of Belgrade and west of Seattle.'

To ignore contribution of the oriental to modern art is an act of ingratitude.This is seen as defensive act against development which would tend to diminish the glory of sections of western achievement.

Lynton's concern was not specifically oriental art but about Iqbal Geoffrey,who was from Pakistan and a successful artist in Britain.

Paragraph 28

The success of these artists were short-lived so much that by the end of the 60s nobody knew or even wanted to talk about them.

English and white artists dominated the art scene from the 60s and became a part of the history of that period.What of the Afro-Asian artists?

Paragraph 29

The rise and fall of an artist is not an uncommon phenomenon.

Sucess of an artist is a complex phenomenon.Success in the market is not the only criterion but the acceptance and institutional support is necessary in the consolidation of the artist's position and place in history.if the Afro-Asian artists did not recieve the support of the institutions,then why?

Paragraph30

Of course,Souza Chandra...did leave London in second half of the 60s to live in New York,they left only because they were no longer doing well in England.

They were lured by the glamour of New York.And living abroad should not make any difference as David Hockney has lived most of his life in California.Malcom Morley ,who spent little time in Britain during his career was given the turner prize.The explanation must be that they were English.

Paragraph 31

Why were things so different for the Afro-Asian artists?

This new situation in Britain after the War is due to the shift towards America in the 60s.This became detrimental to the status of these artists.

Paragraph 32

Given the fact that Britain had lost the Empire andf its economic power,its new alliance with an emerging imperial power is understandable.

London became an important art centre ,which by the early 60s had direct and close connections with New York,the Mecca of the art world.Without this alliance the emergence of new art in Britain in the 60s is unthinkable.At the same time there emerged a new class of critics,historians and art administrators,whose confidence was formed and enhanced by this change.

Paragraph 33

It is difficult to suggest any direct connection between the situation in Britain and America's use of art in Cold War politics,or any collusion beetween the two in relation to what happened to Afro-Asian artists.

The objective of the post-war American cultural imperialism was not just anti-communism but also assertion of its own cultural hegemony over the world.The enntual dissapearance of Afro-Asian art from the British art scene was not fotuitous,nor can it be explained simply as a result of the emergence of new racism, epitomised by Enoch Powelldemanding the return of new commonwealth people to the countries of their origin.Its no coincidence British art became completely white by the end of the 60s.Subsequently no national or international survey of post – war art in Britain has mentioned or included non-European artists.

But things are changing again,maily as a result of the anti-racist struggle in Britain,and now it is officially recognized that Britain is a multiracial society.

A Collage of Indignation : Max Kozloff

Krishnendu Basu

1124138

Thesis statement - "There is also nothing like such a crisis to cause some of us to rethink the

nature of our role as men involved or concerned with creativity."

Paragraph 1:

Topic sentence - "To write of art and politics in the United States in 1967 is surely to court

futility in context of provocation."

Supporting sentence - "It is the predicament of trying to resolve divergent obligations-

intellectual and moral-which public life in this country is always prying further apart, with

stupefying results."

Predicament.

Paragraph Two:

Topic sentence - "We are in a time when the public that is aware of art assimilates all avant-

grade hypotheses into an apparatus of mild titillation."

Supporting sentence - "It is frightful to consider how insistently the present circumstances

make a mockery of so much of current art's Dadaist presumption to operate within the "gap"

between art and life."

Gap.

Paragraph Three:

Topic sentence - "To the argument that the processes of visual art are metaphorical and ritually

self-contained, whereas individual or collective "action" must be pragmatic and literal, I reply

that we are probably guilty of a failure of imagination."

Supporting sentence - "There is a level on which actions cannot focus or connect without the

inner, intangible guidance of a vision."

Intangible guidance.

Paragraph Four:

Topic sentence - "What makes this condition so paradoxical is that both sides back away from

limitless anxiety, as if from a menace that can be so little controlled that it must be ignored."

Supporting sentences - "There is, as it were, an impoverishment of the heart. The freedom from

anxiety is but the other side of a deeper loss of freedom."

Impoverishment.

Paragraph Five:

Topic sentence - "Such are roughly the prevailing conditions under which we have seen the

conclusion of a remarkable week of manifestations against the war, entitled overall, "The Angry

Arts"(although surely, as many have pointed out, it would be more accurate to say, "angry

artists")."

Supporting sentence - "The distinction between an actual antiwar iconography, and works that

only "stood for" the individual's personal attitude was sometimes waived or muddled, but the

public sympathy for the programs (which were often mobbed) was unequivocal."

Iconography.

Paragraph Six:

Topic sentence - "Not since the WPA thirties has there been any tradition of political activism in

American art."

Supporting sentence - "Leaving aside the motley illustrations of the Neo-Impressionists in the

anarchist press of their time, one thinks of the manifestations of the Surrealists as the only

fierce outcry prior to the depression of a committed group of artists against the status quo-in

work, significantly enough, that was restricted to the nonpictorial."

Manifestations.

Paragraph Seven:

Topic sentence - "I say discordantly because this aesthetic wailing wall, thus convocation of

clichés and cretinisms, which was the 'Collage of Indignation", was alienated and homeless in

style, as it was embattled in content."

Supporting sentence - "Frequently one saw a viciousness that was determined to match what it

was ostensibly exposing."

Viciousness.

Paragraph Eight:

Topic sentence - "The problem was not just that artists who had stripped themselves of

everything but sincerity were still clothed in borrowed rags."

Supporting sentence - "The problem, rather, was in a failure of a quality of mind, or artistic

imagination, which had not solved the rhetorical goal to which the common effort had been

legitimately directed."

Rhetoric goal.

Paragraph Nine:

Topic sentence - "Now I wonder if I have not also been sharing in his illness, or perhaps have

been totally uncomprehending, when I impose, at least in part, aesthetic criteria upon a

phenomenon which may be only nominally art."

Supporting sentence - "If, in their passion and peculiar bravery they can chuck aside all artistic

motivation, a critic can perhaps forgo his own professional scruples."

Artistic motivation.

Paragraph Ten:

Topic sentence - "Looked at from any further perspective, such as that of effecting a spiritual or

material change, the situation becomes very dubious indeed."

Supporting sentence - "By contrast, the indirection and ambivalence of ambitious art

(Rosenquist's chrome-plated barbed wire is an example) is socially formulated because it

is "distanced" by its creator."

Ambitious art.

Paragraph Eleven:

Topic sentence - "It could have been that the absentees (they tend to represent the more

affluent, abstract, better-known practitioners in their field) almost foresaw the subordinate

theme of immolation that ran through "The Angry Arts" and declined to participate, almost out

of a sense of self-preservation."

Supporting sentence - "And it was from this feat of desperate imagination, even though the

thought threatened innumerable artists, that the week of anger produced some of its most

lasting effects."

Desperate imagination.

Paragraph Twelve:

Topic sentence - "No one can measure the impact of such a phenomenon as 'The Angry Arts'."

Supporting sentence - "It dimly perceives how mush art cuts away repressions and stereotypes

in its impulse, not toward power (which governments can at least understand) but toward

psychic freedom.

Repressions and stereotypes.

politics and the intelligentsia by- Noam chomsky

                                                                                                                                       
                                                            Tanya tomar
                                                             1124128
 



                                                                                                                                                              &n bsp;                                                                                                                                                                &nb sp;                                                                                                                                                             
                        
Thesis statement                                                                                                                                                               &nb sp;                                                       

The intelligentsia are the historians, journalists which show a picture of reality to the masses.They do their interpretations to show the reality of an event but sometimes its more bound with special interest. It's easy for us to do the interpretations but make sure that we do not put any impression which appears to be false in any way the reason being that we do not have the analytical thinking like the intelligentsia.The analyses only requires stating facts and arguments with some knowledge added to it.A lot of changes took place in the U.S university whereby the students movement demanded tolerated rate of thinking along with this the student movement had its several impact.It even raised the challenge to the subservience of the universities to the state and other external power. So the essay deals with the analyses and the interpretations made by the intelligentsia



1-  Topic statement-   role of intelligentsia in a society like ours
 Supporting statement-  By virtue of their analyses and interpretations they serve as mediators between social facts and the mass of populations
 Keyword-  "Ideological justification for social practice"


2-  Topic statement-  with a little industry and application anyone who is willing to extricate himself from the system of shared ideology and propaganda will readily see through the modes of distortion developed by the substantial segments of the intelligentsia
Keyword-  "Intellectual change"


3- Topic statement- only intellectuals equipped with special training are capable of such analytical work
 Supporting statement-  One must be careful not to give any impression which maybe false in any point. One should even be careful of not mixing the analyses of social and scientific topic which require special training and technique
Keyword-  "Tutelage of intermediaries"


4- Topic statement-  in the analyses of social and political issues its sufficient to face the facts and to follow a national line of argument
 Supporting statement- The willingness to look at facts with open minds and put up arguments and provide a conclusion is only required no other knowledge is needed after that
Keyword- "Rational line of argument"


5- Topic statement-  it is not impossible to create an intellectually interesting theory dealing with ideology and its social base
Keyword- "Ordinary scepticism and application are sufficient"


6- Topic statement- this is one of the ways in which professional intelligentsia serve a useful and effective function within the apparatus of social control
its very important for the professional to make everyone believe in the existence  of an intellectual frame of reference which they alone possess so that they alone have a right to comment on the affairs
keyword-  "Apparatus of social control"



7- Topic statement-  one of the devices used to achieve this narrowness of perspective is the reliance on professional credentials
Keyword- "System of ideological control- indoctrination"
Keyword- "Depart from orthodoxy will rarely be expressed"




8- Topic statement- here in the United States there is an astonishing degree of ideological uniformity for such a complex country
Supporting statement- Two reasons for this 1-there is remarkable ideological homogeneity of the American intelligentsia in general; who rarely depart from one of the variants of the state capitalistic ideology a fact which itself calls for explanation
2-mass media are capitalist institutions
Keyword- "State capitalist"
Keyword- "Mirror image of the soviet union"




9- Topic statement- is the war succeeding?
Supporting statement- it is notable that inspire of the extensive and well known record of government lies during the period of the Vietnam war , the press with fair consistency remained remarkably obedient and quite willing to accept the governments assumption framework of thinking and interpretation of what was happening
Keyword- "The bombing of Laos is a striking case



10- Topic statement-  The United States is exceptional also in that there is no significant pressure for worker participation in management
 Supporting statement- Let alone real workers control
Keyword- "United states is considerably more rigid and doctrinaire in its political thinking and analyses"



11- Topic statement- you would have had great difficulty in finding a Marxist professor or a socialist in an economics department at a major university
Keyword-"The end of ideology"
Keyword- "Range of ideological diversity"



12- Topic statement- the student left is depicted as a menace threatening freedom of research and teaching
The student movement is said to have placed the freedom of the universities in jeopardy by seeking to impose totalitarian ideological control
Keyword- "Totalitarian ideological control"
Keyword- "Reconstruct the orthodoxy"
Keyword- "The time of troubles"



13- Topic statement- many intellectuals are seeking to reconstruct the orthodoxy and the control over thoughts and inquiry which they had institutionalised with such success and which was infract threatened
Keyword- "Intellectual elite"
Keyword- "Opening in the ideological fields"
 

Theories of art after minimalism and pop

                                                                                                                      Reg. no:    1124112

                                                                                                                                               

Theories of art after minimalism and pop: Periodizing critics: Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Thesis statement

There is a certain ironic opportunity in lineup of three critics of the same generation who are on the one hand so different in their historical orientations and affiliations and on other hand clearly united by their indifference toward most of the work currently celebrated by the art market and the mainstream art institutions.

        I.            Keyword: Opportunity

Supporting statement:  Opportunity- to reflect on the current role and function of the critic in aesthetic practice.

      II.            Topic sentence: The interests represented by the three critics are probably equally remote and unattractive.

    III.            Topic sentence: I assume that the decision to invite me to participate in this discussion was at least partially motivated by the fact that the artists with whose works I have been actively involved as a critic and as an editor were precisely those post minimalists and conceptual artists.

Keywords: Post minimalist and conceptual artists.

Supporting sentence: in most cases the artists abandoned the traditional categories, materials and procedures of artistic production.

    IV.         Topic sentence: as much as we might learn from the actual construction of the historical text, we might learn more from the omissions and repressions of those elements of history which would otherwise perturb this construction- it's positing of a linear system.

Keyword:  Canon.

Supporting Sentence: the canon- advertently confirms- the construction of individual oeuvres and authors, and it continues to posit and celebrate individual achievement or collaborative endeavor.

      V.            Topic sentence: The limitation might result from professional specialization and the general compartmentalization of intellectual labor, or it might result from the historian's role casting.

Keyword: Mass cultural and ideological phenomena.

Supporting sentence: The three critics have avoided mass cultural and ideological phenomena, and their determining impact on high- cultural production- with the same compulsive fear with which mass- cultural historians have avoided the structures and complexities of contemporary high cultural objects.

    VI.            Topic sentence:  The practices of the three critics remain despite occasional slander by paranoid conservative critics- relatively depoliticized and apolitical.

Keyword: Depoliticization

Supporting Statement:  The depoliticization is due to an imposed condition which defines our practice as one which transcends concrete political issue.

  VII.            Topic sentence: In the practice, the specificity of materials and the essentianly collaborative nature of aesthetic experience was emphasized and expanded.

Keyword: Discursive critique.

Supporting sentence: Art after minimalism and pop also provided visual high culture with models of a rigorous and systematic institutional and discursive critique- a critique which had emerged previously in critical theory and structuralist and post structuralist discourse, but which is still relatively undeveloped in art criticism.

VIII.            Topic sentence: For the most part artists themselves have assumed the role of legitimist; and this with the near- unanimous enthusiasm of all concerned, for instead of contestation of the dominant cultural and ideological apparatus they deliver valorization and institutional affirmation.

Keyword: Empirical proof of artistic competence or historical parameters of evaluation.

Supporting statement: Therefore, no longer required of the critic to provide reasonable discourse, empirical proof of artistic competence or historical parameters of evaluation and criteria of quality by which legitimation might be gained.

    IX.             Topic statement:  The merger between avant-garde culture and culture industry has initiated among curators and collectors, dealers and artists a new awareness: namely, that management and control, validation and affirmation can just as well be performed from within the ranks of the given institutions and their networks of support.

Keyword: Criteria of evaluation.

Supporting statement:  Criteria of evaluation are currently even begun to trouble a curator's conviction or a journalist's strategy to link the names of those artists.

      X.            Topic  sentence: One of the very preconditions of the successful operation of the current discourse of institutional and economic power is thus that it be able to server all links with the reality of history, and that meaning and history be constructed according to the topical needs of the moment.

    XI.            Topic sentence: it is not the moment for smug remarks and triumphant self- satisfaction regarding the work of the various generations of artists with whom we as critics have been, and are still, identified.

  XII.            Topic sentence: It is not in arts of counter memory alone that the concepts of institutional critique and site specificity, the transformation of audience relationships and models of participation will be rescued as the critical challenge against which all contemporary claims are to be judged.

 

 

 

 

Mystifying Theory; Margot Waddel and Michelene Wander

Riya Thomas

1124122

 

''Mystifying Theory"

Margot Waddel and Michelene Wander

 

Thesis Statement

The mystification of theory and art, rebounds on the impact of the framed objects; they cannot carry the weight of the significance attributed to them and become weak visual metaphors for an esoteric intellectualisation.

1.      Topic Sentence: 'Post Partum Document', which was at the Institute of Contemporary Arts this autumn, aroused much publicity and some notoriety.

Key Word: notoriety

Concerned – some aspects of exhibition – ignored both by media and by Laura Mulvey

 

2.      Topic Sentence: we recognise the importance of the issues Mary Kelly has chosen treat as an artist, and the seriousness and ambitiousness of her project.

Key Word: the mutual mother socialisation process

Feel – the gap between – her intentions and her actual achievements – opposite effect of its apparent aims

 

3.      Topic Sentence: she draws on a relatively new area of psychoanalytic theory to transform selected moments of her relationship with her own child.

Key Word: psychoanalytical/linguistic knowledge

Deep understanding – meant to help provide – basis for women – theorise their own experience. Either viewer bring the knowledge – or use the folder of notes

 

4.      Topic Sentence: However, the note themselves are highly selective, and quite obscure to anyone unfamiliar with concepts and terminology.

Key Word: mystify theory

Mary Kelly – aware – of brief notes – extending understanding – closing gap between – theory and art – serve to theory even further

 

5.      Topic Sentence: The exhibition, free to anyone who wants to walk in, appears to be open and accessible; in fact it is opaque and not so much participatory as excluding and exclusive.

Key Word: esoteric intellectualisation

Mystification of theory – rebounds – impact of the framed objects – cannot carry the weight of significance – become weak visual metaphors – for an esoteric intellectualisation

 

6.      Topic Sentence: We do not simply longer and better notes, but question the whole form of presentation Mary Kelly has chosen; such a heavy dependence on an inadequately presented theory can only distract attention from the 'artistic' nature of the work.

Key Word: nature of psychoanalysis

Because of inadequacy – exhibition is in danger – provoking impatient.

Two important related effects – firstly, depoliticising of vital feminist issues – secondly, confusion about nature of psychoanalysis