Now you can view this blog on your mobile phones! Give a try.

Friday, July 29, 2011

MA English-Western Aesthetics CIA2 - Mapping Essays

Following are the write ups by I Semester MA English Students done as part of their Continuous Internal Assessment 2. The write ups map the seminal essays on Western Aesthetics.


5. Amol Kadam (1124101) : The Other Story; Rasheed Araeen
12. Jordanna Rachel Drego (1124109) :
17. Nitya Santosh (1124115) : Subversive signs; Hal Foster
18. Poonam Vaidya (1124116) : Modernity and Femininity: Griselda Pollock
19. Puja (1124117) : Orientalism; Edward Said
20. Radhika Shenoy (1124119) : Painting: The Task of Mourning; Yve-Alain Bois
25. Sangeeta Nath (11241124) : In The Name of Picasso: Rosalind Krauss
30. Tara Thomas (1124129) : Taking Stock (Unfinished); Hans Haacke
38. Anshuman Manur (1124137) : Culture Wars; Richard Bolton
39. Krishnendu Basu (1124138) : A Collage of Indignation; Max Kozloff
Posted by at No comments:

Thursday, July 28, 2011

 

 Mahto 1

Shreya Mahto   

1124125

Mr.Anil Pinto

MEL: 132: Western Aesthetics

13 July 2011

Philip Leider

Literalism and Abstraction:

Frank Stella's Retrospective

At the Modern

Thesis statement:

Also, a picture isn't abstract just because the artist doesn't know when it's finished. Pollock's message wasn't 'Go Wild'; it was (1) keep the field even and without dominant image or incident; (2) be careful about colour; (3) keep the space as free from the space needed to depict three-dimensional forms as possible; (4) eliminate gesture, let  the method chosen seem to generate the picture.

Paragraph (1)

Topic Sentence: Both abstraction and literalism look to Pollock for sanction; it is as if his work was the last achievement of whose status every serious artist is convinced.

Key words: Pollock, Stella, Cubist grid.

Paragraph (2)

Topic sentence: The literalist view of Pollock emerged somewhat more hazily, less explicitly, more in argument and conversation than in published criticism.

Key words: paint, canvas, handprints, cigarette butts.

Paragraph (3)

Topic sentence: In short, the greatness of the abstraction is in large measure a function of the literalness of Pollock's approach.

Key words: objectness of painting,

Paragraph (4)

Topic sentence: Abstraction was discovering that objectness was the thing to beat, and that the breakthrough to look for was a breakthrough to an inspired two – dimensionalism, and that the way to do it was through colour, and, as much as possible, through colour alone.

Key words: abstraction

Paragraph (5)

Topic sentence: One college student, Stella, saw in John a way to an advanced all overness.

Key words: possibilities of a centred image.

Paragraph (6)

Topic sentence: Stella was crucially interested in keeping his pictures flat because he was crucially interested in making abstract pictures that could survive as post Pollock art.

Key words: Stella's anti literalist ideas, abstract pictures.

Paragraph (7)

Topic sentence: Thus if you are going to make an abstract painting, then you cannot make it in the kind of space used for non-abstract painting.

Key words: abstract painting, non abstract painting.

Paragraph (8)

Topic sentence: The main criticism of the pictures seems to have been that they had nothing to say

Key words: none

Paragraph (9)

Topic sentence: The incipient move into three dimensions implied in Stella's paintings is made manifestly clear in Andre's work of the early 1960s,most explicitly in a work like the 1959-60 untitled construction.

Key words: literal objectness of Stella's paintings, three dimensions, presumption of literalism, literalist.

Paragraph (10)

Topic sentence: The differences between Andre and Judd emerged slowly and steadily all through the 1960s; Andre was to consistently limit himself to solutions that were respectful of, and consonant with, the problems of sculpture, while Judd's indifference to sculpture and its problems would become more obvious every day.

Key words: Minimal Art

Paragraph (11)

Topic sentence: The minimal art craze set everyone back for years; the job of criticism now would seem to be patiently undo the damage and carefully begin the work of revealing the development of a literalist art in America which extends quite unbrokenly from about 1959 to the present and which, in one way or another, involves in its network at least part of the work of artists as diverse as Andre, Judd, Flavin, Serra, Heizer, Morris.

Key words: anti form process or anti illusion.

Paragraph (12)

Topic sentence: The abstractionist critics- mainly Clement Greenberg, then Michael Fried ,William Rubin and others in greater or lesser degree- had, by the mid -1960s,done monumental work.

Key words: Literalism, abstractionist criticism

Paragraph (13)

Topic sentence: Abstractionist criticism tended to ignore the literalists except when it had to deal with Stella.

Key words:  Abstractionist criticism

Paragraph (14)

Topic sentence: As the 1960s drew to a close, the relationship between literalism and abstraction in American art changed considerably.

Key words: Abstract expressionists of the mid -1940s

Paragraph (15)

Topic sentence: Certainly by 1969 and 1970, Stella had thoroughly loosened the overall design structure and seems to have systematically turned more and more of the authority of the paintings over to colour.

Key words: design structure, Stella's art.

 

Posted by at No comments:

cia assignment

Name: Jordanna Drego

Reg. No.:1124109

MEL132 Western Aesthetics

Anil Pinto

13th July 2011

　
The Intrasigent Artist or How the Impressionists Got their Name
by Stephen F. Eiseman
　
Thesis statement:
The new art , between 1874 and 1877, was both Impressionist and Intransigent, that is, affirmative and individualistic, or radical and democratiic
　
Paragraph 1
Topic sentence:
Most histories of Impressionism provide an account of how the movement got its name.
Supporting statements:
In an art exhibition in Paris held by a photographer Nadar, thirty artists participated, including Claude Monet, submitted a painting entitled Impression, soleil levant.
Within a week the terms 'impression', 'effect of an impression' and 'quality of impressions' were being employed in the press.
Louis Leroy was apparently the firts to speak of the school of 'impressionists' in his famous satirical dialogue.
This was followed by Jules Castangary who described 'Impressionism'
the name stuck and the third exhibition was named the 'Exhibition of Impressionists'
the members of this exhibition were remembered as Impressionists.
Key words:
 origin of impressionism.
Paragraph 2
Topic sentence:
 Two aspects of this story of origins concern me.
Supporting sentences:
first, was the basic accuracy of the account
second, what was at stake in naming the new art?
The answers to these questions the author believes will contribute to the history of art and to the ongoing debate on Modernism
Paragraph 3
Topic sentence:
 the word impressionism entered the vocabulary of art criticism at about the same time that the French positivists were undertaking their studies of perception.
Supporting sentences:
-
Charles Baudelaire, in 1863 described the Impression produced by things on the spirit of M.G.[uys]
- by 1870 it had become clear that any art based on impressions, that is upon unmediated sensory experience, must resemble the coloured patchwork that it was believed constituted unreflective vision, what Ruskinhad earlier called 'the innocence of the eye'
Theodore Duret said of Manet 'He brings back the vision he casts on things as truly his own........... a particular note of the palette'.
Paragragh 4
Topic sentence:
Duret thus detected two aspects in Manet's Impression(ism): first, its utter individuality, and second, its stucture of discrete colour 'notes' juxtaposed against, but not blended with their adjacent tone.
Supporting sentence:
the dual nature of Impressionism also underlay Castagary's celebrated usage of 1874.
Castangary meant to signify the individualism of the artists, an idividualism that corresponded to their technique of laying down a mosaic of colours and forms, which was determined by the impression of the exterior world upon their sense organs.
　
　
Paragraph 5
Topic sentence:
Impressionism in 1874 thus connoted a vaguely defined technique of painting and an attitude of individualism shared by an assortment of young and middle-aged artists officially led by Manet.
Supporting sentences:
served as a description of unbridled individualism
assured politically moderate criticsthat the new art had broken with increasingly discredited salon conventions, and remained unsullied by any troubling radical affiliations
Individualism was deemed as an essential instrument for the emancipation of citizens from debilitating ties to former political, economic and religious dogma.
Individualism would be necessary in the massive work of reconstructing France after the disasters of the Franco- Prussian War and commune.
The combination of painterly daring and political discretion suggested by the word impressionism helps account for the suprisingly positive reception given to the new art by many critics.
Key word
: Individualism
Paragraph 6
Topic sentence:
Impressionist was not the only name given to the artists exhibited at Nadar's studio in 1874
The word Intransigent also appeared, and continued to gain popularity until the Impressionists self-naming in 1874.
a critic for Le Fiagio, described the 'brutality of the Intransigents'.
Jules Claretie commented that 'the skill of these Intransigents is nil'
Key word:
 Intransigent
Paragraph 7
Topic sentence:
the French word intransigeant, like the English word intransigent, is derived from the spanish neologism los intransigentes, the designation for the anarchist wing of the Spanish Federalist Party of 1872
Suppoting sentence:
the intransigents were opposed to the compromises offered by the Fedealist
they believed instead that the Spanish constitutional monarchy could bet be toppled by mass armed resistance and a general strike.
When the constitution' fragile coalition finally collapsed in Feb 1873, the intransigents pressed for Cantonial independence against the newly empowered Benevolent Republicans.
The dispute resulted into civil war.
Paragraph 8
Topic sentence:T
he perception that was widespread that the newly hatched Spanish Republic might degenerate into a radical Commune.
the links between the two were direct, as it had been the Commune who helped the Federalist challenge in Spain.
Many Communards had foung refudge in Spain, thus precipitating the belief mentioned above.
An attempted Intransigent coup in July 1873, ignited civil war, but without support of the International, the major Spanish cities or France, the rebels were routed.
The last Intransigent stronghold; Cartagena, had submitted to the increasingly conservative Rebublic in January 1874.
Paragraph 9
Topic sentence:
with the destruction of Intransigentism in Spain, the worg intranigent entered the political and cultural vocabulary of France.
Supporting sentence:
in March 1875, Phillipe Burty, described the landscapes of Impressionist paintings ' who are here called the Impressionists, elsewhere the Intransigents'
Albert Wolff wrote in his review about the Impressionists that 'they barricade themselves behind their own inadequacy'.
Armand Silvestre spoke of Manet and 'the little school of Intransigents among whom he is considerd the leader'.
Gustav Caillebotte composed a late will where in a sum of his money would go to organize an exhibition of works by impressionist or intransigent painters.
Responding to a favourable review in the radical Le Rappel, an anonymous critic wrote,' let us profit that this circumstance ............ could be more natural'
the assertion that the impressionists had joined hands with the Intransigentsin politics was given further support by Louis Enault in Le Constitutionnel, which he called 'Exposition des Intransigents'where he recalls the origins of the word transigent.
A critic for La Gazette , Marius Chaumelin, was more precise about the politics of Intransigent Art and the approapriateness of its name. He claimed the principles of the new art- reform of the laws of colour and design, were derived from the principles of political Intransigents i.e. The radicals who had gained some thirty seats in the March 1876 elections of the Chamber of Deputies.
　
Paragraph 10
Topic Sentence:
 Not all evaluations of the new art as Intransigent came from the political right.
Supporting sentence:
The critic Stephane Mallarme described with the greatest clarity as well as the greatest subtlety the link between radical, or Intransigent, art and politics.
He percieved the new art as an expression of working class vission and ideology
Mallarme argued that , as Romantic fantasy and imagination characterized the first half of the century. The impressionist art marked a significant new stage in social evolution.
The Impressionist artist became the eyes of the 'energetic modern worker'
Mallarme believed that Impressionism was a movement with a radical co-operative programme and the currency of the name Intransigent signalled to him the widespread perception of that fact.
Key words: Romantic Fantacy, radical co-operative programme.
　
Paragraph 11
Topic sentence:
Mallarme offered a set of homologies between Impressionist art and working class or radical vission.
Supporting Sentence:
he began by noting that intransigent art or politics stripped away outmoded principles, seeking a blank slate upon which to write a new cultural and political agenda.
The key term in Mallarme' dialectic was 'The theory of the open air' by which academic formulas were jettisoned in favour of a greater truth.
Open air painting thus provided an objective justification for the discarding of academic traditions of individualist caprice.
He felt that Impressionists stripped away results in pictorial clarity and flatness that mimics the look of the simplepopular art forms favoured by the rising class of workers.
Manet's sea princess illuminates this vaunted simplicity, revealing how the artist's technique of cropping reiterates pictorial flatness.
　
Paragraph 12
Topic sentence:
faced with such conflicting interpretations of such formidable writers as Castangary and Mallarme, the reader by now be wondering whether the new art , between 1874 and 1877, was in fact Impressionist or Intransigent, that is, affirmative and individualistic, or radical and democratic.
Supporting Statement:
the essence of the new art was its determined position between the polarities Impressionist/Intransigent.
The new art must be understood as a signal instance of Modernist dialectics.
Works that primarily explore their own physical origins or constituents are intransigent rebukes to a society that seeks to tailor all culture to its own interests.
The apolitical self-regard of Modernist art creates an enironment favourable to the eventual industrial appropriation of the works.
Yet there have been times when this latter process of appropriation has been sufficiently slowed that a semblance of autonomy has been achieved.
The new art was definable only by uncertanities in critical language between 1874 and 1877.
Paragraph 13
Topic sentence:
 the opposition between the Impressionist and Intransigent art is unresolved in he criticism of Claretie, Chesneau, Burty, Wolff, Silverste, Blemont, Enault, Chaumelin and Mallarme.
Supporting Sentence:
even critics who worked the hardest to claim Impressionism for the moderate Republic was strangely compelled to call attention to its Intransigent alter-ego.
Emile Blavet tried to rescue Impressionism from the left, claiming that the new art represented 'the fruitful renovation of the French School, of a principle of art whose results may be considerable'
If the new art , as we have seen , embodied a 'theory of open air', so too did the criticism, often seeming to 'tremble, melt and evaporate' into ideologiacal unease.
The critics on the left providing no more confident than those on the right.
The uncertain art criticism was thus wholly appropriate to the ambiguities of the new art.
Renoir's rejection of a name encouraged critical uncertainity over the new art, thereby prolonging the period during which it remained between ideological antinomies.
Such a stance was considered by Renoir as part of the tradition of 'the Masters'
　
Paragraph 14
Topic sentence:
 The success of the new art in evading either academicism or political tendentiousness is thus attributed to the refusal of a proper name and the articulation of a new style.
Supporting sentences:
Romanticism had vested artists with the power symbolically to breach the Enlightenment frissure between subject and object, word or thing.
Manet chose to expose these scissions through an art that called attention to its status as fiction.
Manet did not adopt the Jacobian tradition instead as T.J.Clark has shown in his study on Manet was an avoidance of the explicit signs of politics or class achieved through the blankness of human expression and and odd unreliability of gesture, posture, and physical place.
Paragraph 15
Topic sentence:
Manet's art, it may generally be said, elided the oppositions that comprised contemporary ideology: work/leisure, city/country, artifice/authenticity, public/private- in short a whole rhetoric of binaries that seemed to assure the political and class stability.
Supporting statements:
Manet questioned this stability and did so with a modernist style that compelled conviction.
His paintings revealed an undeniable finish, solidity, composure and simple rationality that signalled a real knowledge.
Impressionist followers of Manet similarly succeded in elidind ideological oppositions while still offering something that could approach knowledge.
The evidence of the new painters success in eliding comforting social oppositions provide the aporias that dominate criticism of the new art, that is, the free space between Impressionist and Intransigent.

　
　

　
　
Posted by at 2 comments:

Preliminaries to a possible treatment of 'Olympia' in 1865: TimothyJ. Clark

Chandana Nirwan

1124107



Thesis statement: Olympia's handling of sexuality, and its relation to the tradition of the nude



Paragraph 1

But for reasons we can only guess at, he kept the picture entitled Olympia in his studio for almost two years, perhaps repainted it, and submitted it to the jury in 1865.

Painting- accepted for showing-excited public scrutiny .



Paragraph 2

If Manet's hesitation had to do with anxieties over what the papers would say, then what happened when the Salon opened was to prove his worst fears well-founded.

Critical reaction to Olympia - negative.

I believe this mass of disappointing art criticism can provide an opportunity to say more about the relation of a text to its spectators.

Verses written along with the painting- were another reason for the critics' contemptuous remarks.



Paragraph 3

I intend instead is to sketch the necessary components of such a study( a study of Olympia and its spectators), to raise some theoretical questions which relate to Screen's recent concerns and to give in conclusion, a rather fuller account of the ways in which this exercise might provide 'a materialist reading [specifying] articulations with the [picture] on determinate grounds'.



Paragraph 4

I would like to know which set of discourses Olympia encountered in 1865 and why the encounter was so unhappy.

Two discourses- a) relations and disjunctions of the terms Woman/Nude/Prostitute were obsessively rehearsed. B) complex but deeply receptive discourse of aesthetic judgement in the Second Empire.

Aesthetic judgements- missing from the writings of Olympia – present in spasmodic and unlikely form



Paragraph 5

Olympia is a picture of a prostitute: various signs declare that unequivocally.

Olympia's sexuality –laid out for inspection – appeared in a vocabulary of uncleanness, dirt, death, physical corruption and actual bodily harm.

The oddity: None of the discourses had difficulty in including and accepting the prostitute as one of the possible categories of art.



Paragraph 6

It was some transgression of le discours prostitutionnel that was at stake; or rather, since the characterization of the courtisane could not be disentangled from the specification of Woman in general in the 1860s, it was some disturbance in the normal relations between prostitution and femininity.



Paragraph 7

Certainly it ( Olympia)deserves its place there, but the very word indicates the artificiality of the limits we have to inscribe – for description's sake – around our various 'discourses'.

Nude, sexuality revealed, not-revealed, displayed and masked.



Paragraph 8

The critics asked certain questions on Olympia and did not get an answer.

Questions like: what sex is she, or has she? Has she a sex at all? Can it be included within the discourse on Woman/the nude/the prostitute? Can it be modern example of the nude?



Paragraph 9

It is a matter of tracking down, in the writings on Olympia, the appearance of the normal forms of discourse and the points/topics/tropes at which (or around which) they are simply absent, or present in a grossly disturbed state.

Hand of Olympia- shamelessly flexed, improper, form of a toad, dirty, in a state of contraction.

Olympia's whole body- disobedient, unfeminine.

Critics' unease over Olympia's handling of hair and hairlessness. (Bertall's caricature- a triumph- as cat and flowers place in place of the hand).



Paragraph 10

I think it is possible to say that at its first showing Olympia was not given a meaning that was stabilized long enough to provide the framework for any further investigation- for some kind of knowledge, for criticism.

For spectators Olympia failed to establish a relationship with previous forms of representation.



Paragraph 11

That Olympia is arranged in such a way as to invite comparison with the Titan has become a commonplace of criticism in the twentieth century, and a simple charting of the stages of Manet's invention, in preparatory sketches for the work, is sufficient to show how deliberate was the reference back to the prototype.

1865- Olympia twice talked in reference to the greater tradition of European painting ( with Titan and Ravenel).



Paragraph 12

'This Olympia', wrote Amedee Cantaloube in Le Grand Journal, 'sort of female gorilla, grotesque in indiarubber surrounded by black, apes on a bed, in a complete nudity, the horizontal attitude of the Venus of Titan, the right arm rests on the body in the same way, except for the hand which is flexed in a sort of shameless contraction.'

indiarubber; grotesque.



Paragraph 13

For the most part, for almost everyone, the reference back to tradition in Olympia was invisible.

Feminity



Paragraph 14

I have already said that Ravenel's text is the only one in 1865 that could possibly be described as articulate, and somehow appropriate to the matter in hand.


Ravenel's entry on Olympia.



Paragraph 15

Ravenel's interpretation:

Olympia- the scapegoat of the Salon- Each passer-by takes a stone and throws it in her face.



Paragraph 16

Ravenel – it is the achievement which first impresses us, I suppose –breaks the codes of Olympia.

Reference to Baudelaire and Goya.



Paragraph 17

For a reader like Ravenel it(The discovery of Baudelaire) destablises meaning still further since Baudelaire's meanings are so multiple and refractory, so unfixed, so unmanageable, in 1865.
Meaning



Paragraph 18

For the recognition or attribution of class – once again, we are entitled to draw breath at Ravenel's petite faubourienne.

Petite faubourienne : opens to three phrases- a) a working girl from the faubourgs, b) woman from the farthest edges, c) a character out of Eugene Sue's melodramatic novel of the city's lower depths.



Paragraph 19

The identification of class is not a brake on meaning: it is the trigger, once again, of a sequence of connotations which do not add up, which fail to circle back on themselves, declaring their meaning evident and uniform.
free play of the 'signifier'



Paragraph 20

I suppose it will be obvious that my reading of Olympia will be produced as a function of the analysis of its first readings.

'within historical materialism'



Paragraph 21

My reading of Olympia would address the question: what is it in the image which produces or helps produce, the critical silence and uncertainty I have just described?

Olympia's handling of sexuality and its relation to the tradition of the nude.



Paragraph 22

The picture turns, inevitably, on the signs of sexual identity.
odd coexistence of decorum and disgrace.



Paragraph 23

I shall deal with three aspects of the matter here. a) The question of access and address. B) the in-correctness in the drawing of the body; c) the handling of hair and hairlessness.

One of the primary operations of the nude is, to borrow MacCabe's phrase again, 'a placing of the spectator in a position of imaginary knowledge'.



Paragraph 24

In the 1830s, realism had invented a set of refutations of just these placings.
The Bathers.



Paragraph 25

But The Bathers broke the rules of the nude in other ways, which were hardly more subtle, but perhaps more effective.



Paragraph 26

What Olympia contrives is stalemate, a kind of baulked invitation, in which the spectator is given no established place for viewing and identification, nor offered the tokens of exclusion and resistance.

The woman's gaze- asymmetry of the lids – smudged and broken corner of the mouth….



Paragraph 27

(b) what the critics indicated by talk of 'incorrectness' in the drawing of Olympia's body, and a wilder circuit of figures of dislocation and physical deformity, is, I would suggest, the way the body is constructed in two inconsistent graphic modes, which once again are allowed to exist in too perfect and unresolved an equilibrium.

Certain aspects: Olympia's body – emphatically linear; Olympia is too definite, lack of articulation.



Paragraph 28

c) The manipulation of the signs of hair and hairlessness is a delicate matter for a painter of the nude.
Hair let down : decent, sign of Woman's sexuality

Hairlessness: a hallowed convention of the nude, ladies in paintings do not have hair in indecorous places.

Olympia does not entirely break these rules.



Paragraph 29

Olympia's face is framed, mostly, by the brown of a Japanese screen, and the neutrality of that background is one of the things which makes the address and concision of the woman's face all the sharper.

There are two faces, one produced by a ruthless clarity of edge and a pungent certainty of eyes and mouth, and the other less clearly demarcated, opening out into the surrounding spaces.



Paragraph 30

[…] hair , pubic or otherwise, is a detail in Olympia, and should not be promoted unduly.
signs



Paragraph 31

Is there a difference- a difference with immediate, tactical implications- between an allowed, arbitrary and harmless play of the signifier and a kind of play which contributes to a disruption of the smooth functioning of the dominant ideology?

Specific positioning of the body.



Paragraph 32

It is admirable in 1865 for a picture not to situate Woman in the space- the dominated and derealized space – of male fantasy.

In Olympia, there are signs of the depiction of social identity.



Paragraph 33

Let me make what I am saying perfectly clear. Olympia refuses to signify – to be read according to the established codings for the nude, and take her place in the Imaginary.
Imaginary; relations of dominator/dominated, fantasizer/fantasized.



Paragraph 34

The picture would have to construct itself a position- it would be necessarily a complex and elliptical position, but it would have to be readable somehow- within the actual conflict of images and ideologies surrounding the practice of prostitution in 1865.

The shift between petite faubourienne and courtisane

The endless exchange of social and sexual meanings.



Paragraph 35

In the end Olympia lends its peculiar confirmation to the latter structure, the dance of ideology.

Prostitute: an abject, dominant, equivocal and unfixed term.

An act of unsettling the old codes and conventions.



Paragraph 36

I am pointing to the fact that there are always other meanings in any given social space - counter-meanings, alternative orders of meaning, produced by the culture itself, in the clash of classes, ideologies and forms of control.

meanings.



Paragraph 37

A clue to Manet's tactics in 1865, and their limitations, might come if we widened our focus for a moment and looked not just at Olympia but its companion painting in the Salon, The Mocking of Christ.

Purpose of such paintings: to show us the artifice of this familiar repertoire of modern life, and call in question the forms in which the city contrives its own appearance.

art; tradition.

Posted by at No comments:

WESTERN ASTHETICS Barbara M. Reise Greenberg and the Group: A Retrospective View

Shrutika Ghorpade
1124126

Thesis statement: Greenberg's involvement with Marxism gave him a historical sense which committed him to the avant-garde, converted him to 'abstract' art as a revolution against the established American taste for nationalistic narrative paintings and gave him an evolutionary concept of history allowing him to see the 1940's immigration of European artist as historically establishing new York as the artistic centre of the future.

 

Paragraph1

Topic sentence: "mr. clement Greenberg has been a controversial figures most of his life, a guru to some and a Satan to others.

 

Supporting sentence: his art criticism- especially on American painting and sculpture after the second world war- has been so intelligent, perspective, biased and influential that everyone concerned with contemporary art seems to take some sort of stand in relation to it.

 

Idea: introduction to Greenberg-his work- and the reactions to it.

 

Paragraph 2

Topic sentence: "his previous experiences as editor of partisan review, involvement with Marxist thought, and acquaintance with students of Hohmann prepared him to be a champion of avant-garde painting in journalism which would reach a broad public.

 

Idea: qualifications and associatiation with important people. Influence of Marxism.

 

Key word: avant-garde

 

 

Paragraph 3

Topic sentence: " …corroborative reference for his championing of young American artists against the dominance of the 'school of paris' in the eyes of artists and taste of the world.

 

Supporting sentence: it brought together grahams friends and presented Jackson Pollock's work to the public for the first time, with de Kooning's and Krasner's in juxtaposition with paintings of acknowledged French masters like Braque and Picasso

 

Key word: juxtaposition- to place beside another for comparison.

 

Paragraph 4

Topic sentence: their work dominated his writing at that time and he seemed only peripherally aware of concurrent activity of other young artists like Rothko, still, merman, baziotes, gottlieb who were more closely involved with the French surrealists than with graham Hofmann circle.

 

Idea: Pollock and the rest- Greenberg exposed their work to the larger public and made them famous

 

Key word: championed

 

Paragraph 5

Topic sentence: when the work of the artist known as the first generation abstract expressionism began to receive international acclaim in the 1950s, the quality and courage of greenberg's insight was recognized as well.

 

Supporting sentence: his role easily shifted from the alienated critic writing art columns for intellectual magazines to an impresario in the New York art world judged by his commitment to a specific kind of art and respected for his ultimate success.

 

Idea: growing success of Greenberg

 

Key phrase: prophet in the New York art world

 

Paragraph 6

 

Topic sentence: by mid 1950s greenberg's critical style was clearly different from that of Harold Rosenberg, his chief rival as an interpreter of abstract expressionism.

 

Idea: Rosenberg-rival of Greenberg-style metaphoric-writing of shared experience- not so much for the public.

 

Paragraph 7

Topic sentence: the fact that his rival's 1952 label of 'action painting' caught on quickly and misleadingly infuriated Greenberg and the two men began quarreling.

 

Supporting sentence: greenberg's didactic prose, references to the history of modern art and analysis of the formal properties of exhibited art made his ideas more accessible to critics and the countless art-history and painting students who discovered abstract expressionism in the late 1950s.

 

Key word: accessible ideas

 

Paragraph 8

Topic sentence: during the 1960s, the tone of greenberg's criticism changed.

 

Supporting sentence: in the 1960s it has become more didactic, concerned with philosophy and history, removed from concrete aesthetics encounters, and seemingly sure of its own objectivity.

 

Supporting sentence: in the 1960s, these penchants rigidified into dogmas: allowing only art which confirmed to greenberg's philosophy of art history to be considered as 'authentic', 'serious'; high' art in his discussions.

 

Ides: his style changed from passionate to didactic- more philosophical and historically oriented.

 

Paragraph 9

Topic sentence: this increasingly defensive and academic stance of Greenberg against the subjective nature of aesthetic judgment was begun under the influence of two historical phenomena around 1962: mthe threat to his taste and critical assumption in the success of pop art in the new York art world; and the aesthetic respect for his approach and experience from the American art historical academy establishment.

 

Paragraph 10

Topic sentence: green berg's failure to predict and inability to discuss or even see this type of art seriously threatened his established position as prophet of future trends.

 

Supporting sentence: but Greenberg was naturally alienated by its use of representation conceptual with, and source of "low" commercial popular imagery.

 

Paragraph 11

The irony of hearing a pronouncement on "safe" taste by a man once renowned for the courage of his conviction that Pollock was a master is somewhat lessened by the realization that this taste was "safe" to Greenberg because it was objective as part of the inevitable evolution of history of art.

 

Paragraph 12

Topic sentence: Bernard Berenson's historiographical vision plans greenberg's art historical form firmly in the 19th century.

 

Supporting sentence: since the content of his art history is 20th century art, some interesting disparities between form and content occur.

 

Keyword: historiographical vision

 

Paragraph 13

Topic sentence: the scope of modern art is reduced in greenberg's later writings to a narrow line between impressionism, cubism, late cubism, abstract expressionism and post painterly abstraction.

 

Supporting sentence: reading only Greenberg one would never know the existence of symbolism, futurism, pop art and mixed media happenings.

 

Keyword: distorted history.

 

Paragraph 14:

Topic sentence: this greenbergian distortion of art and history ensures that subjectivity of his evaluations of art no matter how objective he believes his arguments to be.

 

Supporting sentence: it is no more an objective compliment to be included in his history of modern masters than exclusion is an objective damnation to the realm of Kitch.

 

Keyword: objectivity

 

 

 

Paragraph 15

Topic sentence: the sad thing is that this fact has not been apparent to greenberg's followers, some of whose writings show blind adherence to his philosophy as if it were a true criterion for qualitative evaluation.

 

Supporting sentence: the qualitative excellence of being in the forefront of greenberg's progressive modernism is so pervasive an assumption among them that they plot artists' positions like sportscasters describing a horse race.

 

Paragraph 16

Topic sentence: …respectfully reports Greenberg as saying 'that Lichtenstein has proved that abstraction painting is fashionable again', and forecasts (hopefully) 'the eng of pop art as we know it'.

 

Supporting sentence: Lichtenstein's change of pictorial references from popular comic and advertising imagery of the 1940s to popular architectural design of the 1930s is interpreted by tillim as a fashionable nostalgia inferior to bonnie and clied

 

Key word: pop art

 

Paragraph 17

Topic sentence: Kraus and tillim toll the death knell on artistic styles on the objective basis that the art changed from their own labelled concept of it.

 

Supporting sentence: their concern with the death of art by art shows an antagonism naturally arising from the conflict between their concept and the lively irreverence of art to it.

 

Key word: death of art

 

Paragraph 18

Topic sentence: 'art and object hood' of fried presenting objects in a basically theatrical dialogue with the viewer; his analysis of the work of these 'minimalists' is taken from Greenberg with changed labels.

 

Key phrase: rigid understanding of art

 

Paragraph 19

Topic sentence: Greenberg's pronouncements constantly embody insights which, if thought about critically, can provide a structure against which to build one's own artistic vision.

 

Supporting sentence: the obvious danger of swallowing greenberg's philosophy without criticism of it has done much to render irrelevant the determination of these Greenberg followers to write significantly, originally, and influentially.

 

 

  Paragraph 20

Topic sentence: Barbara rose and William Rubin have been influenced by greenberg's criticism, both approach art in terms of history, visual form, and style-epochs, but neither limits himself/herself to greenberg's vision of modern art.

 

Key phrase: critical stand against 'formalists criticism'

 

 

Paragraph 21

Topic sentence: critics try to abstract themselves from the hustle of contemporary history to spend more time thinking and feeling about what a particular artistic experience is all about before they begin relating it to anything

 

Key phrase: we are all critics.

 

 

 

 

 

Posted by at No comments:

In The Name of Picasso: Rosalind Krauss

Sangeeta Nath(1124124)
Semester I
Mr. Anil Pinto

In the Name of Picasso: Rosalind Krauss

Thesis Statement: For a painter, life and art allegorise each other,
both caught up equally in the problem of representation.

Paragraph 1:
Topic Sentence: With these two works, we find ourselves looking at two
different universes-and by this he meant different formal as well as
symbolic worlds.
William Rubin-leading Picasso scholar-described two different
universes-formal and symbolic-insisted on this difference-difference
becomes incontrovertible-a real world model-with a different name.

Paragraph 2:
Topic Sentence: The changes in Picasso's art are a direct function of
the turns and twists of the master's private life.
1920's-sordid conditions of Picasso's marriage-his passion for the
somnolent blonde-she was seventeen-was to reign over half dozen years
of his art-Olga and Marie Therese provide-not antithetical moods and
subjects-of the same artist-but function as determinants in a change
in style-Autobiographical Picasso-Rubin was the first to invoke
it-changes in Picasso's art-direct function of the turns and twists of
the master's life-except cubism-his style is inextricable from his
biography.

Paragraph 3:
Topic Sentence: With the Museum of Modern Art's huge Picasso
retrospective (1980) has come a flood of critical and scholarly essays
on Picasso, almost all of them dedicated to 'Art as Autobiography'.
Art as Autobiography-name of a just published book on Picasso-sees his
work as a pictorial response to some stimulus in his personal life-the
same author-accounts to 'prove'-Picasso's decision to go to Paris to
pursue his art-due to his need to exile himself from Spain to escape
his tyrannical mother-provides a delicious but unintended parody of
the Autobiographical Picasso.

Paragraph 4:
Topic Sentence: But prone to parody or not, this argument is upheld by
many respected scholars and is attracting many others.
John Richardson-took up to review Museum of Modern Art
exhibition-agreed with Dora Maar-Picasso's art is a function of
changes in five private forces-his mistress, his house, his poet, his
set of admirers, his dog-Autobiographical Picasso-new to Rubin-his
earlier practice-of ways of understanding art in transpersonal
terms-Rubin's case is instructive-has all account of the personal, the
private, the biographical-a series of proper names of Olga, Marie,
Dora, Francoise, Jacqueline.

Paragraph 5:
Topic Sentence: Unlike allegory, in which a linked and burgeoning
series of names establishes an open-ended set of analogies-there is in
this aesthetics of the proper name a contraction of sense to the
simple task of pointing or labelling, to the act of unequivocal
reference.
Achieving a type of signification beyond which-no further reading or
interpretation-interpretation-must stop somewhere-more absolutely and
appropriately in-positive identification-an individual-a 'key' to an
image-thus the 'meaning' of the image-a singularity-like a name-the
meaning stops within the boundaries of identity.

Paragraph 6:
Topic Sentence: The instance of 'positive identification' that led off
to a last dozen years' march of Picasso studies into the terrain of
biography was the discovery of a major painting of the Blue Period-La
Vie, 1904.
La Vie-contained a portrait of Casagemas-Spanish painter and friend of
Picasso-committed suicide in 1902-till 1967-La Vie interpreted within
the general context of fin-de-siecle allegory-with relevant
comparisons of Gauguin's D'Ou Venons Nous? And munch's Dance of
Life-when a real person is placed as a model for the male figure-the
earlier interpretation could be put aside-picture could be seen as
tableau vivant-dead man torn between two women-one old and one
young-earlier studies showed the male figure as Picasso's self
portraiture-thus the artist's identification with his friend is
evident.

Paragraph 7:
Topic Sentence: The problem with this reading is not that the
identification is wrong, but that its ultimate aesthetic relevance is
yet to be proven or even, given current art-historical fashion,
argued.
Aesthetic relevance-problem is it dissociates the work from all other
aspects-nothing to do with Casagemas and sexually provoked suicide-the
left out fact being-work is located in-highly fluctuating and
ambiguous space-of multiple planes of representation-the setting is an
artist's studio-figures are related to an allegory of painting-Courbet
and Manet say-for a painter-life and art allegorize each other-equally
caught up in the problem of representation.


Paragraph 8:
Topic Sentence: La Vie is after all a narrative painting and this
close examination of its dramatis personae is an understandable
(though in sufficient) response to the work.
Recent study by Linda Nochlin-takes up the question of Picasso's
colour-completely ignored earlier-modernist art-colour would seem set
the furthest possible –this is not true-1912-Nochlin analyses cubist
painting to be grisaille-broken by intrusion of a flat plane striped
in red, white, blue-'Notre avenir…'-inaugurates both the invention of
collage and the opening of cubism to colour.

Paragraph 9:
Topic Sentence: The actual red-white-and-blue tricolore pamphlet that
Picasso depicted in this cubist still life had been issued originally
to promote the development of aviation for military use.
The pamphlet means-French nationalism-its colour bear the name of
Picasso's country.

Paragraph 10:
Topic Sentence: Thus the significance of colour reduces to a name, but
then, in the following example, so does the significance of names.
Robert Rosenblum- 'Picasso and the Typography of Cubism' –proposes to
read the names printed and identify the objects labelled-many
newspapers are named-frequent usage of Le Journal-Rosenblum describes
the name as fractured and the puns released-JOU, JOUR and
URNAL-realism of Picasso's cubist collages-secures-the presence of
actual objects-the new imagery of the modern world.

Paragraph 11:
Topic Sentence: The most recent major addition to the scholarly
inquiry on cubism is Pierre Daix's catalogue raisonne, Picasso:
1907-1916.
Daix-insists on characterizing collage elements as signs-not in a
loose way-but in a way that announces its connection to structural
linguistics.

Paragraph 12:
Topic Sentence: Daix is careful to subdivide the sign into signifier
and signified.
Signifier-affixed collage bit-element of schematic
drawing-signified-referent to the signifier-may not be an
object-rather a free floating property-like a texture-Daix tells
us-cubist collage-exchanges the natural visual world of things-for
artificial and codified language of signs.

Paragraph 13:
Topic Sentence: But there is, nowhere in Daix's exposition, a rigorous
presentation of the concept of sign.
Concept of sign-Daix's manner-easy to convert the issue of collage
sign-to a question of semantics-transparent connection-to a theatre of
a proper name.

Paragraph 14:
Topic Sentence: If we are really going to turn to structural
linguistics for instruction about the operation of the sign we must
bear in mind the two absolute conditions posited by Saussure for the
functioning of the linguistic sign.
Saussure-two conditions-first condition-analysis of signs-relationship
between signifier and signified-signifier a material
constituent-signified an immaterial idea or concept-insists on the
literal meaning of the prefix re-in representation.

Paragraph 15:
Topic Sentence: This grounding of the terms of representation on
absence-the making of absence the very condition of the
representability of the sign-alerts us to the way the notion of the
sign-as-label is a perversion of the operations of the sign.
Representation on absence-representability of the sign-sign as
label-doubles a material presence-by giving it its name-sign-a
function of absence rather than presence-coupling of signifier and
immaterial concept-therefore no referent-no thing at all.

Paragraph 16:
Topic Sentence: This structural condition of absence is essential to
the operations of sign within Picasso's collage.
Picasso's collage-structural condition of absence-is essential-one
example-appearance of two f-shaped violin sound holes-inscribed on the
surface of work-signify the presence of musical instrument-two fs do
not mirror each other-the inscription involves-a vast disparity
between the two letters-one bigger and thicker than the other-simple
but emphatic size difference-Picasso composes the sign-not of
violin-but of foreshortening-this experience of inscription-forms the
status of signs.

Paragraph 17:
Topic Sentence: What Picasso does with these fs to compose a sign of
space as the condition of physical rotation, he does with the
application of newsprint to construct the sign of space as penetrable
or transparent.
Sign of space-penetrable and transparent-perceptual disintegration of
the fine type-a sign of the broken colour-painting represents
atmosphere-thus Picasso inscribes transparency on the collage's
fabric-which is otherwise reified and opaque.

Paragraph 18:
Topic Sentence: The extraordinary contribution of collage is that it
is the first instance within the pictorial arts of anything like a
systematic exploration of the condition sof representability entailed
by the sign.
Formal strategies-developed from collage-first into synthetic-then
late cubism-insistence of figure/ground reversal-continual
transposition between negative and positive form-structure of
signification-no positive sign without negation of material
referent-contribution of collage-systematic exploration of conditions
of representability.

Paragraph 19:
Topic Sentence: The use of word fragments is not the sprinkling of
nicknames on the surfaces of these works, but rather the marking of
the name itself with the condition of incompleteness or absence which
secures for the sign its status as representation.
Notion of absence-preconditions of sign-visible objections-to cubist
collages-use of word fragments-not sprinkling nicknames-rather marking
of the name-status of sign as representation.

Paragraph 20:
Topic Sentence: The declaration of the diacritical nature of the sign
establishes it as a term whose meaning is never an absolute, but
rather a choice from a set of possibilities.
Saussure-second condition-operation of the sign-not on absence as on
difference-'In language there are only differences'-difference
implies-positive terms-but in language-differences without positive
terms-diacritical nature of sign-never an absolute.

Paragraph 21:
Topic Sentence: In analysing the collage elements as a system of
signs, we find not only the operation of absence but also the
systematic play of difference.
Collage-system of signs-operations of absence-and play of
difference-1913-Violin and Fruit-reads as 'transparency' or
'luminosity'-patch of wood grained paper-sign for open form-as opposed
to close form-complex cubist collages-each element
diacritical-instantiating both line and colour-closure and
openness-plane and recession-system of form-not systemised in collage.

Paragraph 22:
Topic Sentence: That form cannot be separated from Picasso's
meditation on the inner workings of the sign.
Form-cannot be separated from the inner workings of the sign-when
operates within the pictorial field-function of formal status-act of
literalisation-opens up the field of collage-to the play of
representation-for supporting ground-the obscured resurfaces in a
miniaturised facsimile.

Paragraph 23:
Topic Sentence: The collage element as a discreet plane is a bounded
figure; but as such it is a figure of a bounded field-a figure of the
very bounded field which it enters the ensemble only to obscure.
Collage elements-perform the occultation of one field-to introject the
figure of a new field-a surface is the image of eradicated
surface-eradication of the original surface-reconstitution of the
figure-collage as a system of signifiers-absence of a master term.

Paragraph 24:
Topic Sentence: The various resources for the visual illusion of
spatial presence becomes the ostentatious subject of the
collage-signs.
Resources of visual illusion of spatial presence-becomes an
ostentatious subject-of collage signs-in writing-they guarantee its
absence-collage-thus is the representation of representation-beyond
the analytic dismemberment-into constituent elements.

Paragraph 25:
Topic Sentence: What collage achieves, then, is a metalanguage of the visual.
Collage-metalanguage of the visual-talks about space without employing
it-can figure the figure through constant superimposition-can speak in
turn of light and shade-through the subterfuge of a written text-as a
system-inaugurates a play of differences-both about and sustained by
an absent origin-fullness of form is grounded-forced impoverishment-a
ground both supplemented and supplanted.

Paragraph 26:
Topic Sentence: it is often said that the genius of collage, its
modernist genius, is that it heightens-not diminishes-the viewer's
experience of the ground.
Genius of collage-heightens viewers experience of the ground-the
ground-forces itself on our perception-but in collage-ground is
literally masked and riven- enters our experience-not as an object of
perception-but as an object of discourse-of representation.

Paragraph 27:
Topic Sentence: It is here we can see the opening of the rift between
collage as a system and modernism proper.
Collage-operates in direct opposition to perceptual plenitude and
unimpeachable self presence-modernism's goal-to objectify the
constituents of a given medium-beginning with the very ground-the
objects of vision-collage problematises the goal-setting up discourse
in place of presence-founded on a buried origin-fuelled by that
absence-the discourse-leads through the maze of polar alternatives of
painting-displayed as a system-this system-never objectified-but only
represented.

Paragraph 28:
Topic Sentence: We are standing now on the threshold of a
postmodernist art, an art of a fully problematised view of
representation, in which to name (represent) an object may not
necessarily be to call it forth, for there may be no (original)
object.
Simulacrum-postmodernist notion of the originless play of the
signifier-structure of post modernism-representational system of
absence-recognised as the contemporaneous alternative to
modernism-Picasso's collage-an extraordinary example of proto history.

Paragraph 29:
Topic Sentence: At the very same moment when Picasso's collage becomes
especially pertinent to the general terms and conditions of
postmodernism, we are witnessing the outbreak of aesthetics of
autobiography, what I have earlier called an art history of the proper
name.
Aesthetics of autobiography-an art of the proper name-finding an exact
referent –is questionable-with regard to art-when applied to Picasso
in particular-is highly objectionable-and to collage-is
grotesque-collage-raises the investigation of the impersonal workings
of pictorial form.

Paragraph 30:
Topic Sentence: The linguistic structure of signs 'speaks' Picasso's
collages and, in the 'signs' burgeoning and transmuting play, sense
may transpire even in the absence of reference.
Daix-in classic collage-stresses on the de personalisation of
Picasso's drawing-use of pre existent and industrialised
elements-language-as per Saussure-is at stake in reference to
readymade and impersonal-a synchronic repertory of terms-into
which-each individual must assimilate himself.

Paragraph 31:
Topic Sentence: The aesthetics of the proper name is erected
specifically on the grave of form.
Aesthetics of proper name-more than a failure-with the structure of
representation-that failure is an extremely serious one.

Paragraph 32:
Topic Sentence: One of the pleasures of form-held at least for a
moment at some distance from reference-is its openness to multitude
imbrications in the work, and thus its hospitableness to polysemy.
Pleasures of form-openness to multitude imbrications-and its
hospitableness to polysemy-determined 'formalists'-glorified in the
ambiguity and multiplicity of reference-made available by the play of
poetic form.

Paragraph 33:
Topic Sentence: For the art historians of the proper name, form has
become so devalued as a term (and suspect as an experience), that it
simply cannot be a resource for meaning.
Rosenblum's simple semantics-does not enrich the forms of cubist
collage-it depletes and impoverishes them-by giving everything a
name-it strips signs of its special modality of meaning-and capacity
to represent-deprecation of the formal-the systematic-is now much more
open-the boredom with form-emblematic of a dismissal-widespread among
historians.

Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)