For a Nontrivial Art (original) (raw)
Related papers
2020
The publication of this book has been made possible with the support of Kone Foundation.
What Is Art: The Viewer’s Horizon
Roczniki Kulturoznawcze
The presented statement is part of the volume it covers a variety of responses from people who interact with art in different ways. The aim is to suggest to the participant of the contemporary world a new, personal perspective to rethink what is this area of our world that we label with art; thoughts with and without theoretical suggestions - reflections by the creators and reflections by the audience, teaching humility and uniqueness, perhaps - forming a fresh perspective on art.
2019
Abstract: The purpose of this essay is to explore the nature and role of art as a human phenomenon from a broadly cognitive perspective. Like science and religion, art serves to mediate the unknown, at once to embrace and to defend against the fundamental mystery of existence. Thus, it may challenge the status quo while generally serving to maintain it. Art tracks the individuation of subjectivity, serving the pleasure principle, yet is appropriated by the collective’s commitment to the reality principle. While science and religion close in on serious answers to fundamental questions, art opens up possibilities toward playfulness, uselessness, imagination, and arbitrary whim. Though art has no unifying definition, meaning, or intent through time and across cultures, it remains important to people, both to do and to enjoy. It serves to counterbalance the naive realism of science, the “rationality” of modern society, and the literalism of text-based religion. While its allegiance is divided, its most worthy intent is to aid us to confront and negotiate the great mystery revealed to us in consciousness.
The ‘ART RESORT’ Or the story of the non-art passing itself off as art
It is indisputable that art does not have a major impact on intellectual progress or much influence on real life today. But, why? What is happening? The Art Resort tries to answer these questions. On a small scale, what happens in art is the result of the model, which, in turn, is the result of something greater: the market for the intangible. The history of the conversion of the intangible to the tangible (e.g. an idea to a drawing) is as old as civilization, and it is always a difficult operation. During the last twenty years converting the intangible to the tangible, for commercial reasons, has focused on the abstract and has expanded into new fields. Traditionally, the intangible, by way of advertising, was objectified in the form of basic goods (like food or drink) or luxury goods (like clothing, houses or cars). In this way, Coca-Cola bubbles evoked happiness and the car moving through the landscape, freedom. Now, the intangible only results in other intangibles, which are almost impossible to realize. In this way experience becomes travel, thinking becomes meditation and wellness becomes relaxation. It is the market of the intangible squared. This new market is focused on leisure and culture. In this way, we can explain the way the art center in recent years has followed the model of tourism and has become an art ‘resort.’ In this context, The Art Resort tells the story of the struggle between non-art and art. And in the story non-art is winning so far. The book describes the elements and strategies employed by art in order to clarify what is not art, but attempts to pass itself off as art. This ‘civil war’ of art has consequences not only for art and artists (which is of little interest and affects very few), but also for the residents of the place where the struggle is taking place. The city is the battlefield. The Art Resort tells the story of the redefinition of what constitutes city. Description by chapter The first part of the book, comprising the Models of Separation and Systems of Production and Systems of Ritual, concerns itself with the tourist resort model applied to the museum, both on a large scale - comparing this particular tendency of tourism with art (Chapter 1), and on a small scale - breaking it down into categories and analyzing the individual components (Chapter 2). Chapter 3, Is This Art? is an attempt to define the subject art by setting out a series of attributes. The definition of art is reached from an instrumental perspective, rather than from an essentializing perspective, that is, from the defensive position that art takes against the encroachment on its territory. Thus, this chapter serves as a kind of parenthesis between the first and second parts. The second part focuses on the relationship between art, work and money. Within this section, Chapter 4, Art and Money = Art and The Market, answers the question of why other markets function well, while the art market does not. Chapter 5, Art and Money = Art and Work, deals with the strange relationship that art maintains with work and money. This section offers a theory as to why these relationships have come into existence, and what the consequences have been for the artist. Chapter 6, Satellites and Secondary Structures, lists a series of practices and their supplementary parts (universities, artists’ collectives, non-profit associations, autonomous social centers etc.), which orbit like satellites around the main structure of the museum, and explain how they each have their own concerns.The last part, Everyday Revolutionary Actions, is a selection of my projects, letters and texts on art about art.
The traditional conception of art is about sensual beauty and refined taste; modern art on the other hand has introduced an entirely unexpected dimension to the visual arts, namely that of 'revelatory narrative'. Classical art aspires to present works which can be appreciated as sensually beautiful; modern art, when it succeeds, presents us instead with the unsettling narrative. This radical difference in artistic purpose is something relatively new, and not yet fully appreciated or understood.
Finding Our Bearings with Art | nonsite.org.pdf
This article explores the pragmatics of artworks, arguing that they are best understood as social actions, and as modes of address that lack the settled semantics and syntax of ordinary sentences. Three modes of address are explored, with Anselm's Kiefer's "Nigredo" (1986) serving as a central example. Implications for art criticism are also explored.
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
and led them to create in Harrison's words, a "studio filled up with large pictures of cunts." And he continues, "For a while, it was these, rather than the process of masking, that claimed autonomy of a kind, though-if this is not a contradiction-it was in their very stylistic degeneracy that their self-sufficiency seemed to lie" (p. 137). This gives a sample of Harrison's somewhat unusual style of art writing. "Masking" refers to the coverings that were made to hide the original Courbet painting from a viewer who might be shocked; it also refers to the coy attitudes of Khali-Bey, who commissioned it and hid it behind a landscape of Courbet, and to the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, into whose possession it came and who hid it behind a painting by Andre Masson (p. 135). At least there are moments of entertainment hidden in this history of art! The final section, "Whose Looking," raises questions that have preoccupied several American aestheticians. Harrison, rather than musing over the end of art, as we do, titles his essay "Painting and The Death of The Spectator" (pp. 171-191). He begins with this provocative statement: "The question whether anyone should persist with painting as an art hangs over this book, as of many others concerned with the practical and theoretical circumstances of art in general at the end of the twentieth century and the outset of the twenty first" (p. 171). Conditions that, in his opinion, would justify painting into the future would be reasons to "persist with the making of pictures," and an audience who would find them "edifying." He is frightened by the production of "blank painting" in our time and seems to be haunted by the Balzac story, "The Unknown Masterpiece." Underlying his anxiety is the conviction that painting must realize "imaginative perception" through which it delivers both knowledge and strong feeling to the viewer. That is, he sees the need for theory to be generated within and through painting itself and not imposed upon it by philosophical ideas of the sort that modernism itself tried to escape. It will be helpful to the reader if Harrison's examples are set alongside Danto's example of a set of red rectangles, intended to demonstrate the role of theory in interpretation of a set of objects exactly alike (see The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, chap. 1). Harrison's response to this problem is the statement, "If any blank surface can be 'a painting' ... how can painting any longer claim to be the occasion for significant acts of critical discrimination?" (p. 181). In contrast, Danto's analysis shows that painting itself generates philosophical interpretations, and often must be interpreted by the viewer through a philosophical structure. Harrison, whose presuppositions are different from Danto's, insists that painting is a "socially significant activity ... that involves cooperation, exchange, self-criticism, and learning," all contributing to what he calls "a culture of ideological resistence" (p. 173). What he means, I think, is that painting must, in a kind of Deweyan sense, be actively fruitful in the lives of the perceiver. And if that is no longer possible, then painting is at an end, or should be given up. One gets the impression that Harrison feels bereft in the postmodern-anythinggoes world he sees about him and that the Art & Language movement sees itself in its explorations as marking the end of a historical process culminating in the death of the spectator.