"Where the Old Masters created an illusion of space into which one could imagine walking, the illusion created by a Modernist is one into which one can look, can travel through, only with the eye." - Clement Greenberg
"Today, each artist must undertake to invent himself, a lifelong act of creation that constitutes the essential content of the artist's work. The meaning of art in our time flows from this function of self-creation." - Harold Rosenberg
Rough Draft Share Due on Monday!
Sula Bermúdez-Silverman VTLS talk
Thursday at 7 PM!
Zoom Link: https://chapman.zoom.us/j/97954073252
Robert Arneson, Jackson Pollock, 1983.
Action/ Abstraction
Norman L. Kleebatt, "Action, Abstraction, Reaction" in Action/ Abstraction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
Interpreted American art after WWII through existentialism
Artists now saw the canvas as an "arena in which to act"
Artists as individuals engaged in the creative process as an escape from the alienation of the modern world
Content came from activity of making (the creative act)
Hedda Sterne, Machine 5, 1950.
The Tradition of the New, 1959
Abstract Expressionism represented a starting point forward
"The big moment came when it was decided to paint . . . just to PAINT. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from Value — political, aesthetic, moral.... The lone artist did not want the world to be different, he wanted his canvas to be a world. Liberation from the object meant liberation from the “nature”, society and art already there."
Joan Mitchell, City Landscape, 1955.
The goal is no longer to produce an object of aesthetic pleasure
Rather, the purpose is to embody the inner dimensions of the psyche on the canvas-a record of the event of painting
"The act-painting is of the same metaphysical substance as the artist’s existence. The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life."
The motive for painting was more important than the medium
Elaine de Kooning, Harold Rosenberg, 1956.
Action Painting: A Decade of Distortion,1962
Rosenberg argued that Greenberg's formalism was academic
Attacked Greenberg's personal involvement in the making and selling of artist's works who he championed
Purchased by Eli Broad in 2005 for $23.8 milion making it the most expensive contemporary work sold at auction at the time
David
Smith, Cubi XXVII, 1965.
The problem was that modern art had been "institutionalized" and promoted solely on "aesthetic quality" by the "bureaucrats of taste"
As a result, modern art had lost its relevance to the public and art criticism had failed to reflect contemporary experience.
Art had become just another commodity.
Dorothy Dehner, Formulation, 1969.
Connected Abstract Expressionism with the goals of earlier avant garde movements like Dada and Surrealism
The avant garde opened up the future for art by allowing infinite possibility
Importantly, these radical breaks argued for the integration of art with life
Argued that the avant-garde had not broken with tradition.
Rather, that painters were moving towards greater emphasis on the flatness of the picture plane.
Dialogue on flatness moved their art away from the Old Masters
Artists had previously seen the flatness of the picture plane as a hurdle to overcome in the attempt to depict three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface
Arte Povera = Arte povera means literally ‘poor art’ but the word poor here refers to the movement’s signature exploration of a wide range of materials beyond the traditional ones of oil paint on canvas, bronze, or carved marble. Materials used by the artists included soil, rags and twigs. In using such throwaway materials they aimed to challenge and disrupt the values of the commercialised contemporary gallery system. - Tate Museum
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Venus of the Rags, 1967 and 1974.
Jannis Kournellis, Untitled (12 horses), 1969.
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Sfera di giornali (Newspaper Sphere) or Walking Sculpture, & 2017.
