DOCSLIB.ORG

Anna Ostoya's Avant-Garde

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Anna Ostoya's Avant-Garde REVISIONIST HISTORIES: ANNA OSTOYA’S AVANT-GARDE Tom Williams In a sculpture from 2010, Primary Structure with a Plant it exemplifies Ostoya’s larger effort to recover the criti- (The Plant as a Metaphor in George Orwell and Other Con- cality of the avant-garde in the face of its failures. texts), Anna Ostoya restages the domestication of Mini- The early-twentieth-century avant-garde movements— malism by making this domestication literal. This austere and to some degree their successors of the 1960s—devel - white pillar echoes Robert Morris’s plywood sculptures oped in antic ipation of radical political change. Their from the mid-1960s in both its materials and its anthro- histories are predicated on the possibility of revolution- pomorphism—its nearly human proportions—until a ary praxis. As Peter Bürger and others have pointed out, motorized platform concealed within the column raises the aim of the avant-garde was to abolish the autonomy a potted plant through its top and into sight. As if sum- of art and reintegrate it into daily life, and accounts of moned by a magician’s incantation, the plant transforms this project abound in its literature. “Down with art,” the vertical structure from a modernist sculpture into a proclaimed Alexander Rodchenko, “as a means to es- base for an ugly, inglorious little houseplant. This partic- cape from the life that is not worth living.”3 If art was ular plant, an aspidistra, was, as Ostoya notes, a metaphor the sublimation of revolutionary impulses, then fulfilling for middle-class materialism and conformity in George those impulses entailed the negation of art. The lan- Orwell’s novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936).1 Her guage of these movements was, however, often total - Minimalist column, a once-radical form, thus alludes to itarian. Futurism, for example, promised to “exalt the swift commodification of avant-garde practices and aggressive action” and to “glorify war—the only hygiene their trans formation into a bland embellishment of the of the world—militarism, patriotism,” and “contempt anodyne decor of late capitalism. for women,” thereby offering extreme, but not unique, Primary Structure with a Plant relays the familiar tale versions of the avant-garde break with the bourgeois of “the tradition of the new.” Just a few years before the past.4 Even Walter Benjamin—one of Futurism’s most Jewish Museum’s 1966 landmark Minimalist exhibition, vehement detractors—succumbed to inflammatory, “Primary Structures” (from which Ostoya took the title chauvinist rhetoric when he celebrated the historical for her sculpture), art historian Leo Steinberg famously materialist who was “man enough to blast open the con- quipped that the enfant terrible was destined to become tinuum of history.”5 If the neo-avant-garde artists of “an elder statesman” in a short span of seven years. the 1960s seldom employed such violent rhetoric, they “The rapid domestication of the outrageous,” he wrote, nevertheless embraced their forebears’ extreme break “is the most characteristic feature of our artistic life, and with the past and repudiation of aestheticism. the time lapse between shock received and thanks Born of the intense political contests of the nineteenth returned gets progressively shorter.”2 During the fifty and twentieth centuries, the avant-garde often seems years since his prediction, we have repeatedly witnessed irrelevant in a “postpolitical” world in which we have this cycle. Even as Primary Structure with a Plant enacts been told again and again that there is no alternative to this recurrence of scandal and retroactive vindication, the free market and liberal politics. While she makes no 20 PRIMARY STRUCTURE WITH A PLANT (THE PLANT AS A METAPHOR IN GEORGE ORWELL AND OTHER CONTEXTS), 2010, from the Autopis series MDF, acrylic, electric mechanism, and potted plant; 63 ¾ x 21 ⅝ x 33 ¾ inches (162 x 55 x 35 cm) grand claims in relation to these circumstances, Ostoya super ficial observers of contemporary art have been aims to reestablish art’s political valence in the face witness to an endless litany of neos and posts. But of such depoliticization by striving to recuperate the most of these revivals, as so many critics have noted, mission of the avant-garde, if not its authoritarianism, have little in common with the revolutionary aspirations intellectual chauvinism, misogyny, and will to power. To of their predecessors. borrow Carol Duncan’s celebrated formulation, Ostoya Like many of her contemporaries, Ostoya rehearses has dedicated herself to avant-gardism, but without its these histories in both her work and her writing, but she commitment to “virility and domination.”6 Her aspira- resituates and complicates the avant-garde’s program of tions echo the poet and artist Anne Boyer’s call for a revolutionary transformation. Ostoya’s appropriations “provisional avantgarde.” Such an avant-garde, Boyer of works by Gustave Courbet, John Heartfield, Lyonel claims, would “mimic something other than war or Feininger, Kazimir Malevich, and innumerable others machines or violent manly death”; it would offer “a constitute a revisionist reading of twentieth-century art healthy combination of jouissance and juiciness.”7 These rather than a mere deconstruction of its claims to imme- sentiments correspond, in many respects, to Ostoya’s diacy and rupture.8 In her work, avant-garde histories conviction that the avant-garde’s commitment to social become artistic material. In an interview, she describes and political change cannot be discarded without risking her relationship to art history generally: either cynicism or aestheticism. I would like to treat art history as a material or a medium. To me, like paint it has its form and its I. Elasticity and Endurance consistency. It has its history—the history of art history. Maybe it is better to say: it has its histories. The developments the avant-garde inspired have in I like this material. It seems the most interesting recent years been the objects of innumerable artistic material to work with now since it changes . revivals and deconstructions, and the appropriation of how art and history can be understood. By work- its forms has become one of the most consistent maneu- ing with art history as material, I mean engaging vers in the art of the past thirty years. Even the most critically with its narratives.9 22 THE TRADITION OF INTENSITY AND FORCE, THE TRADITION OF ELASTICITY AND ENDURANCE, 2010, from the Autopis series 2011, from the Autopis series Framed archival pigment print on paper; 16 ⅜ x 11 ½ inches Framed archival pigment print on paper; 16 ⅜ x 11 ½ inches (41.5 x 29.2 cm) (41.5 x 29.2 cm) If Ostoya is acutely aware of art-historical narratives, her to radical politico-artistic programs—Abstract Expres- preoccupations are not, as she notes, with historiography sionists, Conceptualists, Futurists, Surrealists, etc.; Elas- so much as with a dialectical reconsideration of the his- ticity and Endurance highlights isolated faces of women. tory of twentieth-century art. One of her most consistent These juxtapositions call attention to the familiar story tactics has involved juxtaposing iconic twentieth-century of the patriarchy of the avant-garde. As her titles suggest, figures with images drawn from outside normative his- each of these photomontages recounts the history of tory. In one series, for example, she appropriated images modern art from a distinct standpoint, and her presen- of leading avant-garde artists—including famous photo- tation proposes an equivalence between them. In one, graphs of the “irascibles” of the New York School, the we witness the male-dominated tradition of avant-garde Conceptualists featured in Seth Siegelaub Gallery’s pio - defiance and, in the other, a countertradition that cele- neering exhibition “January 5–31, 1969,” and numerous brates the solitary accomplishments of the women artists others—and collaged them together in a patriarchal who moved in the shadows. rogues’ gallery that she called The Tradition of Intensity The related Pseudomorphisms (2010‒11) stage similar and Force (2010). Two women (Hedda Stern and juxtapositions. Although many of these photomontages Rotraut Uecker) appear within this ocean of male faces, address politics and popular culture, they also often take but they are outliers. In a companion piece, The Tradi- on the histories of the avant-garde. In one, the American tion of Elasticity and Endurance (2011), she montaged sculptor Eva Hesse and the Polish sculptor Alina faces of women artists that she had gathered from pub- Szapocznikow appear side by side in an arrangement lications and through Google image searches for “a wife, that levels their incommensurate reputations. Both a girlfriend, or a lover of a male artist.” The differences images angle away from the wall and converge like the between these works are striking: Intensity and Force fea- sides of a prism so that viewers must shuffle back and tures groups of men who are united in their commitment forth between them, making the act of comparison a 24 physical exercise. For another, Visual Pseudomorphism in In recent years, Bürger’s theory has sustained this Monochrome (2010), Ostoya mounted reproductions of understanding of photomontage as an assault on art. Minimalist sculptures onto jigsawed pieces of fiberboard Ostoya’s use of it, however, presents a different reading. to make them into a child’s matching game. Views of The Pseudomorphisms—those involving photomon- works from a 1964 Robert Morris exhibition at the tage—often feature two images rather than a plurality of Green Gallery in New York are positioned beside images fragments, and through these binaries, she implores the of formally similar works by Zbigniew Gostomski in a viewer to consider relationships between two realities. 1967 exhibition at the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw.10 She These works do not stage destruction, as they are little thereby made the task of differentiating them into a puz- more than juxtapositions of images.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Bridges Conference Proceedings Guidelines
    Proceedings of Bridges 2014: Mathematics, Music, Art, Architecture, Culture Juan Gris’ Color Symmetries James Mai School of Art / Campus Box 5620 Illinois State University Normal, IL 61790-5620, USA E-mail: [email protected] Abstract Juan Gris, Spanish-born artist and contemporary of Picasso, brought to cubism a new compositional rigor grounded in geometry and a new vibrancy of color. Art historians and critics have commented upon the strength and uniqueness of Gris’ color, yet little has been written about either the specific colors or the possible color strategies employed by the artist. Examining the color organizations in the artist’s paintings and correlating these with the artist’s writings, the author describes the properties of limited-color palettes employed by Gris. The color- symmetry palette is defined as a special type of limited-color palette and is proposed as the primary color organization developed and employed by Gris between 1918 and 1924. Building on the author’s prior analyses of Gris’ compositions, the color-symmetry palettes are shown to correlate with and to reinforce Gris’ compositional symmetries. Introduction Juan Gris (1887-1927) was born José Victoriano Carmel Carlos González-Pérez in Madrid. In 1902 Gris began studies in mathematics, physics, engineering, and science at the Escuela de Artes y Manufacturas. In 1904 he abandoned those studies to train as an artist and subsequently began making a modest living as a magazine and newspaper illustrator in Madrid. He adopted the pseudonym Juan Gris (“John Gray”), moved to Paris in 1906, and took up residence in the Montmartre studio apartment building where Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) lived and worked.
    [Show full text]
  • Parcours Pédagogique Collège Le Cubisme
    PARCOURS PÉDAGOGIQUE COLLÈGE 2018LE CUBISME, REPENSER LE MONDE LE CUBISME, REPENSER LE MONDE COLLÈGE Vous trouverez dans ce dossier une suggestion de parcours au sein de l’exposition « Cubisme, repenser le monde » adapté aux collégiens, en Un autre rapport au préparation ou à la suite d’une visite, ou encore pour une utilisation à distance. réel : Ce parcours est à adapter à vos élèves et ne présente pas une liste d’œuvres le traitement des exhaustive. volumes dans l’espace Ce dossier vous propose une partie documentaire présentant l’exposition, suivie d’une sélection d’œuvres associée à des questionnements et à des compléments d’informations. L’objectif est d’engager une réflexion et des échanges avec les élèves devant les œuvres, autour de l’axe suivant « Un autre rapport au réel : le traitement des volumes dans l’espace ». Ce parcours est enrichi de pistes pédadogiques, à exploiter en classe pour poursuivre votre visite. Enfin, les podcasts conçus pour cette exposition vous permettent de préparer et d’approfondir in situ ou en classe. Suivez la révolution cubiste de 1907 à 1917 en écoutant les chroniques et poèmes de Guillaume Apollinaire. Son engagement auprès des artistes cubistes n’a jamais faibli jusqu’à sa mort en 1918 et a nourri sa propre poésie. Podcasts disponibles sur l’application gratuite du Centre Pompidou. Pour la télécharger cliquez ici, ou flashez le QR code situé à gauche. 1. PRÉSENTATION DE L’EXPOSITION L’exposition offre un panorama du cubisme à Paris, sa ville de naissance, entre 1907 et 1917. Au commencement deux jeunes artistes, Georges Braque et Pablo Picasso, nourris d’influences diverses – Gauguin, Cézanne, les arts primitifs… –, font table rase des canons de la représentation traditionnelle.
    [Show full text]
  • Zombies in Western Culture: a Twenty-First Century Crisis
    JOHN VERVAEKE, CHRISTOPHER MASTROPIETRO AND FILIP MISCEVIC Zombies in Western Culture A Twenty-First Century Crisis To access digital resources including: blog posts videos online appendices and to purchase copies of this book in: hardback paperback ebook editions Go to: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/602 Open Book Publishers is a non-profit independent initiative. We rely on sales and donations to continue publishing high-quality academic works. Zombies in Western Culture A Twenty-First Century Crisis John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro, and Filip Miscevic https://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2017 John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro and Filip Miscevic. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro and Filip Miscevic, Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2017, http://dx.doi. org/10.11647/OBP.0113 In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https:// www.openbookpublishers.com/product/602#copyright Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/ All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://www.
    [Show full text]
  • Cubism in America
    University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Sheldon Museum of Art Catalogues and Publications Sheldon Museum of Art 1985 Cubism in America Donald Bartlett Doe Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/sheldonpubs Part of the Art and Design Commons Doe, Donald Bartlett, "Cubism in America" (1985). Sheldon Museum of Art Catalogues and Publications. 19. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/sheldonpubs/19 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Sheldon Museum of Art at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Sheldon Museum of Art Catalogues and Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. RESOURCE SERIES CUBISM IN SHELDON MEMORIAL ART GALLERY AMERICA Resource/Reservoir is part of Sheldon's on-going Resource Exhibition Series. Resource/Reservoir explores various aspects of the Gallery's permanent collection. The Resource Series is supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. A portion of the Gallery's general operating funds for this fiscal year has been provided through a grant from the Institute of Museum Services, a federal agency that offers general operating support to the nation's museums. Henry Fitch Taylor Cubis t Still Life, c. 19 14, oil on canvas Cubism in America .".. As a style, Cubism constitutes the single effort which began in 1907. Their develop­ most important revolution in the history of ment of what came to be called Cubism­ art since the second and third decades of by a hostile critic who took the word from a the 15th century and the beginnings of the skeptical Matisse-can, in very reduced Renaissance.
    [Show full text]
  • A Stylistic and Contextual Analysis of Juan Gris' Cityscape Imagery, 1911-1912 Geoffrey David Schwartz University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
    University of Wisconsin Milwaukee UWM Digital Commons Theses and Dissertations December 2014 The ubiC st's View of Montmartre: A Stylistic and Contextual Analysis of Juan Gris' Cityscape Imagery, 1911-1912 Geoffrey David Schwartz University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.uwm.edu/etd Part of the History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons Recommended Citation Schwartz, Geoffrey David, "The ubC ist's View of Montmartre: A Stylistic and Contextual Analysis of Juan Gris' Cityscape Imagery, 1911-1912" (2014). Theses and Dissertations. 584. https://dc.uwm.edu/etd/584 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by UWM Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of UWM Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE CUBIST’S VIEW OF MONTMARTRE: A STYISTIC AND CONTEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF JUAN GRIS’ CITYSCAPE IMAGERY, 1911-1912. by Geoffrey David Schwartz A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Art History at The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee December 2014 ABSTRACT THE CUBIST’S VIEW OF MONTMARTE: A STYLISTIC AND CONTEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF JUAN GRIS’ CITYSCAPE IMAGERY, 1911-1912 by Geoffrey David Schwartz The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2014 Under the Supervision of Professor Kenneth Bendiner This thesis examines the stylistic and contextual significance of five Cubist cityscape pictures by Juan Gris from 1911 to 1912. These drawn and painted cityscapes depict specific views near Gris’ Bateau-Lavoir residence in Place Ravignan. Place Ravignan was a small square located off of rue Ravignan that became a central gathering space for local artists and laborers living in neighboring tenements.
    [Show full text]
  • Helix: Algorithm/Architecture Co-Design for Accelerating Nanopore Genome Base-Calling
    Helix: Algorithm/Architecture Co-design for Accelerating Nanopore Genome Base-calling Qian Lou Sarath Janga Lei Jiang [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Indiana University Bloomington Indiana University - Purdue Indiana University Bloomington University Indianapolis ABSTRACT KEYWORDS Nanopore genome sequencing is the key to enabling personalized nanopore sequencing; base-calling; processing-in-memory medicine, global food security, and virus surveillance. The state-of- ACM Reference Format: the-art base-callers adopt deep neural networks (DNNs) to trans- Qian Lou, Sarath Janga, and Lei Jiang. 2020. Helix: Algorithm/Architecture late electrical signals generated by nanopore sequencers to digital Co-design for Accelerating Nanopore Genome Base-calling. In Proceedings DNA symbols. A DNN-based base-caller consumes 44:5% of to- of the 2020 International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation tal execution time of a nanopore sequencing pipeline. However, Techniques (PACT ’20), October 3–7, 2020, Virtual Event, GA, USA. ACM, New it is difficult to quantize a base-caller and build a power-efficient York, NY, USA, 12 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3410463.3414626 processing-in-memory (PIM) to run the quantized base-caller. Al- though conventional network quantization techniques reduce the 1 INTRODUCTION computing overhead of a base-caller by replacing floating-point Genome sequencing [8, 21, 34, 35, 37] is a cornerstone for enabling multiply-accumulations by cheaper fixed-point operations, it sig- personalized medicine, global food security, and virus surveillance. nificantly increases the number of systematic errors that cannot The emerging nanopore genome sequencing technology [15] is be corrected by read votes. The power density of prior nonvolatile revolutionizing the genome research, industry and market due to memory (NVM)-based PIMs has already exceeded memory thermal its ability to generate ultra-long DNA fragments, aka long reads, tolerance even with active heat sinks, because their power efficiency as well as provide portability.
    [Show full text]
  • The Pennsylvania State University the Graduate School College Of
    The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of Arts and Architecture CUT AND PASTE ABSTRACTION: POLITICS, FORM, AND IDENTITY IN ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST COLLAGE A Dissertation in Art History by Daniel Louis Haxall © 2009 Daniel Louis Haxall Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2009 The dissertation of Daniel Haxall has been reviewed and approved* by the following: Sarah K. Rich Associate Professor of Art History Dissertation Advisor Chair of Committee Leo G. Mazow Curator of American Art, Palmer Museum of Art Affiliate Associate Professor of Art History Joyce Henri Robinson Curator, Palmer Museum of Art Affiliate Associate Professor of Art History Adam Rome Associate Professor of History Craig Zabel Associate Professor of Art History Head of the Department of Art History * Signatures are on file in the Graduate School ii ABSTRACT In 1943, Peggy Guggenheim‘s Art of This Century gallery staged the first large-scale exhibition of collage in the United States. This show was notable for acquainting the New York School with the medium as its artists would go on to embrace collage, creating objects that ranged from small compositions of handmade paper to mural-sized works of torn and reassembled canvas. Despite the significance of this development, art historians consistently overlook collage during the era of Abstract Expressionism. This project examines four artists who based significant portions of their oeuvre on papier collé during this period (i.e. the late 1940s and early 1950s): Lee Krasner, Robert Motherwell, Anne Ryan, and Esteban Vicente. Working primarily with fine art materials in an abstract manner, these artists challenged many of the characteristics that supposedly typified collage: its appropriative tactics, disjointed aesthetics, and abandonment of ―high‖ culture.
    [Show full text]
  • Surface Work
    Surface Work Private View 6 – 8pm, Wednesday 11 April 2018 11 April – 19 May 2018 Victoria Miro, Wharf Road, London N1 7RW 11 April – 16 June 2018 Victoria Miro Mayfair, 14 St George Street, London W1S 1FE Image: Adriana Varejão, Azulejão (Moon), 2018 Oil and plaster on canvas, 180 x 180cm. Photograph: Jaime Acioli © the artist, courtesy Victoria Miro, London / Venice Taking place across Victoria Miro’s London galleries, this international, cross-generational exhibition is a celebration of women artists who have shaped and transformed, and continue to influence and expand, the language and definition of abstract painting. More than 50 artists from North and South America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia are represented. The earliest work, an ink on paper work by the Russian Constructivist Liubov Popova, was completed in 1918. The most recent, by contemporary artists including Adriana Varejão, Svenja Deininger and Elizabeth Neel, have been made especially for the exhibition. A number of the artists in the exhibition were born in the final decades of the nineteenth century, while the youngest, Beirut-based Dala Nasser, was born in 1990. Work from every decade between 1918 and 2018 is featured. Surface Work takes its title from a quote by the Abstract Expressionist painter Joan Mitchell, who said: ‘Abstract is not a style. I simply want to make a surface work.’ The exhibition reflects the ways in which women have been at the heart of abstract art’s development over the past century, from those who propelled the language of abstraction forward, often with little recognition, to those who have built upon the legacy of earlier generations, using abstraction to open new paths to optical, emotional, cultural, and even political expression.
    [Show full text]
  • Synthetic Cubism at War: New Necessities, New Challenges
    RIHA Journal 0250 | 02 September 2020 Synthetic Cubism at War: New Necessities, New Challenges. Concerning the Consequences of the Great War in the Elaboration of a Synthetic-Cubist Syntax Belén Atencia Conde-Pumpido Abstract When we talk about the Synthetic Cubism period, what exactly are we referring to? What aesthetic possibilities and considerations define it insofar as its origin and later evolution are concerned? To what extent did the disorder that the Great War unleashed, with all its political, sociological and moral demands, influence the reformulation of a purely synthetic syntax? This article attempts to answer these and other questions relating to the sociological-aesthetic interferences that would influence the Parisian Cubist style of the war years, and in particular the works of Juan Gris, María Blanchard, Jacques Lipchitz and Jean Metzinger during the spring and summer that they shared with one another in 1918, until it consolidated into what we now know as Crystal Cubism. Contents Cubism and war. The beginning of the end or infinite renewal? At a crossroads: tradition, figuration, synthesis and abstraction The Beaulieu group, the purification of shape and the crystallization of Cubism in 1918 and 1919 Epilogue Cubism and war. The beginning of the end or infinite renewal? [1] The exhibition "Cubism and War: the Crystal in the Flame", held in the Picasso Museum in Barcelona in 2016,1 highlighted the renewed production undertaken in Paris during the war years by a small circle of artists who succeeded in taking Synthetic Cubism to its ultimate consequences. 1 Cubism and War: the Crystal in the Flame, ed.
    [Show full text]
  • Richard Pousette-Dart, the Forgotten Man of Abstract Expressionism
    ALL SECTIONS (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/) Culture Art More › Culture › Art › Artists Art's quiet American: Richard Pousette-Dart, the forgotten man of abstract expressionism Richard Richard Pousette-Dart's Within the Room (1942) CREDIT: ROBERT GERHARDT AND DENIS Y. SU By Alastair Sooke, CRITIC AT LARGE Follow 11 NOVEMBER 2018 • 8:00AM Home My Feed Saved n 1951, Life magazine published a photograph of 14 men – and one woman – in a studio, Istaring solemnly at the camera. They were, as the headline put it, the “Irascibles”: the principal players in abstract expressionism, united in their anger about a recent survey of contemporary painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which they felt was too reactionary. There they all are, the big beasts of 20th-century American art: Mark Rothko, smoking on a stool in the front row; slick-haired Willem de Kooning, glaring from the back; and at the centre, the eye of this artistic storm, Jackson Pollock, hunched in a chalk-stripe suit. But who is the figure standing at the far left? Wearing a dark shirt and tie and a baggy, double-breasted jacket, he looks like a movie mobster. In fact, he was a brilliant painter and now the subject of an exhibition at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, the first devoted to him in this country. His name was Richard Pousette-Dart (1916-92), and he is the forgotten man of abstract expressionism. “He was a deeply private, shy, and extremely peaceful person,” says his 71-year-old daughter, Joanna, speaking by phone from New York.
    [Show full text]
  • Rethinking Minimalism: at the Intersection of Music Theory and Art Criticism
    Rethinking Minimalism: At the Intersection of Music Theory and Art Criticism Peter Shelley A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2013 Reading Committee Jonathan Bernard, Chair Áine Heneghan Judy Tsou Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Music Theory ©Copyright 2013 Peter Shelley University of Washington Abstract Rethinking Minimalism: At the Intersection of Music Theory and Art Criticism Peter James Shelley Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Dr. Jonathan Bernard Music Theory By now most scholars are fairly sure of what minimalism is. Even if they may be reluctant to offer a precise theory, and even if they may distrust canon formation, members of the informed public have a clear idea of who the central canonical minimalist composers were or are. Sitting front and center are always four white male Americans: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. This dissertation negotiates with this received wisdom, challenging the stylistic coherence among these composers implied by the term minimalism and scrutinizing the presumed neutrality of their music. This dissertation is based in the acceptance of the aesthetic similarities between minimalist sculpture and music. Michael Fried’s essay “Art and Objecthood,” which occupies a central role in the history of minimalist sculptural criticism, serves as the point of departure for three excursions into minimalist music. The first excursion deals with the question of time in minimalism, arguing that, contrary to received wisdom, minimalist music is not always well understood as static or, in Jonathan Kramer’s terminology, vertical. The second excursion addresses anthropomorphism in minimalist music, borrowing from Fried’s concept of (bodily) presence.
    [Show full text]
  • The Flatbed Picture Plane
    Excerpt from Other Criteria: The Flatbed Picture Plane LEO STEINBERG (1920-) I borrow the term from the flatbed printing press—‘a horizontal bed on which a horizontal printing surface rests’ (Webster). And I propose to use the word to describe the characteristic picture plane of the 1960s—a pictorial surface whose angulation with respect to the human posture is the precondition of its changed content. It was suggested earlier that the Old Masters had three ways of conceiving the picture plane. But one axiom was shared by all three interpretations, and it remained operative in the succeeding centuries, even through Cubism and Abstract Expressionism: the conception of the picture as representing a world, some sort of worldspace which reads on the picture plane in correspondence with the erect human posture. The top of the picture corresponds to where we hold our heads aloft; while its lower edge gravitates to where we place our feet. Even in Picasso’s Cubist collages, where the Renaissance worldspace concept almost breaks down, there is still a harking back to implied acts of vision, to something that was once actually seen. A picture that harks back to the natural world evokes sense data which are experienced in the normal erect posture. Therefore the Renaissance picture plane affirms verticality as its essential condition. And the concept of the picture plane as an upright surface survives the most drastic changes of style. Pictures by Rothko, Still, Newman, de Kooning, and Kline are still addressed to us head to foot—as are those of Matisse and Miró. They are revelations to which we relate visually as from the top of a columnar body; and this applies no less to Pollock’s drip paintings and the poured and Unfurls of Morris Louis.
    [Show full text]