marți, 7 aprilie 2015

David Cottington -"Modern Art. A Very Short Introduction"

O altă încercare curajoasă de-a mea de a scrie câte ceva despre o carte de non-beletristică.
Cartea despre arta modernă a lui David Cottington încearcă să explice paradoxul între atitudinea generalizată de ridiculizare şi neînţelegere faţă de noile creaţii de artă modernă (ştim cu toţii celebra statuie a lui Traian cu lupoaica din faţa Muzeului Naţional de Istorie din Bucureşti –obiect preferat al mişto-urilor fotografice pe Facebook; sau ţeapa cu ou din Piaţa Revoluţiei) şi interesul crescut al publicului faţă de artă, după cum reiese din inflaţia de galerii de artă şi spaţii expoziţionale neconvenţionale din ultimul timp.
Din punctul meu de vedere, cartea nu reuşeşte extrem de bine ceea ce-şi propune, dar este o lectură plăcută (atunci când nu e plictisitoare, evident) şi foarte utilă ca introducere în arta modernă pentru cititorul nepretenţios.

Ideile pe care le-am reţinut din carte:

-despre modernism
"[...] a continually renewed struggle over the definition of cultural meaning, the discovery and representation of new audiences, and the development of new strategies to counteract and develop resistance against the tendency of the ideological apparatuses of the culture industry to occupy and to control all practices and all spaces of representation." (Benjamin Buchloh)
"[...] a picture was not a window onto that world but a constructed image of it, one that used devices and conventions of representation whose meanings were no longer as secure as they were once thought to be, would be the prerequisite of any attempt to say, in paint, something worth saying about the modern world"
"At the start of the 20th century, art distinguished itself from what wasn’t art by its materials as much as anything else. [...] art today distinguishes itself from what isn’t art by being able to be made out of absolutely anything."
"[...] if they were no longer subordinated to their mimetic function, the illusionistic devices of painting (the capacity of marks and colours on a flat surface to create a whole fictional world of space and form, light and shade) were free to be a source of the deepest visual and intellectual enjoyment." "[...] what made a work of art was no longer this craft work, but the intellectual work of conceiving it"
"Such a mismatch between the public’s language of ridicule and establishment apologetics has, of course, been the characteristic of the relation between modern art and its popular audience."

-despre revoluţia produsă în înţelegerea şi aprecierea artei începând cu mijlocul secolului al 19-lea
"[...]the steady encroachment of commercial values upon all aspects of the cultural practices [...] provoked some artists to seek to escape [...] the commodification, and the complacencies of an `establishment` art in which those values were inscribed" (organizarea acelui Salon des Refusés din Paris în 1863, urmat de academii de artă private, formarea de grupuri de artişti care se întâlneau în medii neconvenţionale, cum ar fi cafanelel sau cabareturile)
"The social base of modern art began to broaden at about the same time as its cultural headquarters moved across the Atlantic, from Paris to New York, in a development for which the consolidation of the USA’s economic and political hegemony and the threat from Hitler that drove avant-garde artistis from Europe shared much responsibility." (MoMa este înfiinţat în New York în 1929 cu fonduri de la Rockefeller –era singura colecţie publică de artă din lume dedicată exclusiv artei moderne)
"[...] if a greater variety of artistic practices could be allowed to flourish, they would be able to meet the demands of an increasingly varied and expanding middle-class clientele with a multiplicity of pictorial and sculptural styles and products."
"The collectors, of course, were the key; without a willingness to speculate, on the part of enough people with sufficient money to do so, the new market would not have emerged."
"The bars, clubs, and studios of SoHo were a crucible of ideas in mid-century, and the forging of a coherent set of artistic practices that, in keeping with avant-gardist principles, built on and went beyond European modernism was as much the achievement of critics [...] as of artists in the thick of things."

-ce curente artistice şi artişti sunt menţionate (lista este selectivă, nu exhaustivă -adică ce mi-am mai notat eu): impresioniştii, mişcarea dada, suprarealiştii, Diego Rivera, constructiviştii ruşi (Vladimir Tatlin), Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Haacke cu "documentary installations", expresionismul abstract (Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko), Pop Art, revista "Artforum", neo-expresionism, Warhol, Robert Rauchenberg, Robert Morris, Michael Landy ("Brakdown" în 2001)

-despre Pollock trebuie să adaug aceste observaţii care pe mine m-au ajutat:
"The `vulgarity` of Pollock’s methods of painting, and their apparent abandonment of craft skills [...] should not be understood only in terms of their formal effects and innovations [...] but also in terms of the idea behind this abandonment –as putting those skills specifically into questions, as part of the meaning of the paintings. They did this in two ways. First, in restoring to the act of painting something in the rawness and psychic potential that were lost in the very acquisition of painterly skills, not just for expressive effect but as a means of evading the co-optive reach of mainstream tase. [...] And second, in their implicit reference, clearer perhaps to viewers at the time of their painting than to us now, to the `automatist` techniques of the surrealist painters."

-actul de artă modernă care mi-a atras atenţia: în 1975 Carolee Schneemann a avut un `peformance` numit "Interior Scroll" unde "she stood naked before her audience, gradually unravelling a scroll from her vagina, and reading from this a critique of her work by a structuralit film-maker as too personal and clutter with emotion".

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