This lecture users the theme of taste to explore the subject of postmodernism, building to a consideration of 'Bad' Painting and the work of German artist Anton Henning. By James Clegg
2. Getting to know you... Name A personal example of good or bad painting? What do you think âpostmodernismâ is? Whatâs your favourite food?
3.
4.
5. âThe Papuan tattoos his skin, his boat, his oar, in short, everything that is within his reach. He is no criminal. The modern man who tattoos himself is a criminal or a degenerate. There are prisons where eighty percent of the inmates bear tattoos. Those who are tattooed but are not imprisoned are latent criminals or degenerate aristocrats. If a tattooed person dies at liberty, it is only that he died a few years before he committed a murder.â âThe evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from objects of daily use.â Adolf Loos (1908) [Ornament and Crime]
7. â"Beauty is truth, truth beauty" - That is all ye know on earth and all ye need to knowâ Keats (1820) Ode on a Grecian Urn Nicholas Poussin (1638-40) The Arcadian Shepherds
13. Today Part 1: Developing a taste for distinction... We will begin by finding out what type of paintings you like and dislike and start to explore the reasons why. To give discussions a critical backdrop we will conclude by looking at the work of Pierre Bourdieu and his most influential study, Distinction. 9:00 â 11:00, Seminar and discussion
14. Today Part 2: Postmodernism and âbad paintingâ Using the idea of taste we will think about the emergence of marginalised groups, the growth of consumerism and also the profound changes to the way we might understand or practice painting after Conceptual Art. Bad Painting might be Good Painting after all? 11:30 â 13:30, Lecture and seminar
15. Today Part 3: The art of Anton Henning Visiting Talbot Rice Gallery will allow us to put what we have learnt in to practice. We take time to explore Interieur No. 495 and develop interpretations of it. 15:00 â 17:00, Gallery visit, activities and discussion.
20. Jean-Michel BasquiatSelf-Portrait as a Heel, Part Two (1982) Basquiat (1960-88) was seen by some, such as critic Rene Racard, to be a prodigal son of the New York streets bringing together the presentness of graffiti and a consciousness of art history. He befriended Andy Warhol and became very successful. Some critics at the time dismissed his work because they felt it naively assumed a âprimitiveâ black vernacular. More recent observations by Art Historians like Alison Pearlman or Black activists such as Bell Hooks, read greater depth in his art and see it, respectively, as a carefully conceived, postmodern response to his position in the American art market, and as an emotional deposit of feelings of repression. Does this information confirm or challenge your vote?
21.
22. CraigieAitchisonLily Still Life (1974) Exhibited at Talbot Rice Gallery in 2010, CragieAitchison (1926-2009) has an adoring following. Scottish Art Historian Bill Hare made comparisons of Aitchisonâs work to Van Gogh, Gauguin and Mattisse and wrote, âThe central dialectic of modernist painting â continually hovering between the painted surface and the pictorial space, between the mimetic image and the decorative pattern... Achieves a perfect synthesis of the real and the ideal on the surface of CragieAitchisonâs paintingâ. Does this information confirm or challenge your vote?
23.
24. George Grosz The Engineer Heartfeld(1920) The Dada art movement was an intentional âirrationalâ reaction against the social structures that had led to the (âirrationalâ) mechanised killing of millions. In Berlin, where Grosz and his fiend John Heartfield â pictered - worked, the situation was particularly heated and Dada took on a highly political role. Does this information confirm or challenge your vote?
25.
26. Wolf Howard Mrs Chippy(2001) âPeople have said to me, âWhatâs the point in painting a cat? My five-year-old daughter could do that.â Yes, she could, but would it be a cat that had the look in its eyes that conveyed to you that it was about to be shot? Thatâs the fate that befell Mrs Chippy during one of the greatest survival adventures ever â Ernest Shackletonâs voyage to the Antartic in 1914 on the ship Endurance â shown in the background of the painting, stuck in the ice, as the crew drag the small open boat which later accomplished an 850 mile rescue journey through sixty-foot waves. Thatâs the difference between my cat and a five-year-oldâs. I also paint cats where there is no differenceâ Wolf Howard, artists statement Does this information confirm or challenge your vote?
27.
28. Rosemarie TrockelVorstudie (Preliminary Study) (1989) Exhibited at Talbot Rice Gallery in 2011. Considered one of the leading figures of her generation, building upon and simultaneously criticising the work of artists like Joseph Beuys. Develops a feminist critique of authority within her work, questioning the construction of identity. Does this information confirm or challenge your vote?
29.
30. Pablo Picasso Les Demoiselles dâAvignon(1907) Considered to be a seminal work of Modern Art and considered by some to be the first Cubist work. Does this information confirm or challenge your vote?
31.
32. Vladimir TretchikoffChinese Girl (1952) Highly popular as a print during the 1950s and 1960s. Does this information confirm or challenge your vote?
33.
34. Glenn BrownJesus: The Living Dead (after Adolf Schaller)(1907) Glenn Brown was nominated for the turner prize in 2000. He meticulously copies the works of other artists borrowing from established, recognised artists like Frank Auerbach and also popular images by artists such as Adolf Schaller, who has devoted his career to painting the universe. âThe simple act of painting has been turned into a conceptual minefield. Visual reality is being questioned by an artist who, we soon find out, is enough of a science-fiction buff to know that all visual realities are questionable. And the fact that Auerbachâs original seems so full of raw and mannish emotion makes Brownâs pseudo-scientific re-creation of it very spooky.â WaldemarJanuszczak (2009) Glenn Brown â the thinking mans artist. Independent. Does this information confirm or challenge your vote?
35.
36. Philip Guston The Mirror (1956) In the 1950s, Canadian artist Philip Guston had successfully moved from political muralism to the then dominant mode of painting, Abstract Expressionism. He was considered to have a special talent. Does this information confirm or challenge your vote?
37.
38. Philip Guston Flatlands (1970) In 1970 Guston made a radical departure from Abstract Expressionism because he felt it was wrong to ignore the social and political problems of the time. His new figurative work now referenced criminality, the Ku Klux Klan and Rochard Nixon, among other things, and was done in a crude cartoon style. Conservative art critic Hilton Kramer ridiculed Guston for being âchildlikeâ, an âurban primitiveâ. Guston: âI got sick and tired of all that Purity! I wanted to tell stories⌠I felt like a movie director. Like opening a pandoras box, all those images came out.â âSo when the 1960s came along I was feeling split, schizophrenic. The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I sitting at home, reading magazines, going in to a frustration about everything â and then going in to the studio to adjust a red to blueâ Does this information confirm or challenge your vote?
39.
40. Sam ToftDoris Earwigging Sam Toft, working for The Art Group, has sold over 2 Million prints worldwide. Original works fetch up to ÂŁ6000. Does this information confirm or challenge your vote?
41.
42. Jack Vettriano Scotlandâs wealthiest painter, Vettriano makes over ÂŁ500,000 per year from prints alone. Vettrianoâs prints outsell prints of Picasso. Originals can fetch up to ÂŁ250,000. Does this information confirm or challenge your vote?
44. Bourdieu and âDistinctionâ Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1989) [1970] is still considered the most comprehensive survey of taste. Bourdieuâs work challenges the notion that taste is innate, in other words he argues that taste is determined by economic and social causes rather than being something youâve either got or havenât got. What makes Distinction so important however, is that it showed how taste is implicated in segregation and social hierarchys.
47. Bourdieu and âDistinctionâ Gathering evidence from years of dedicated study, Distinction showed that taste was closely linked to peopleâs class backgound. Bourdieu sought to find out peoples response to a work considered to be of high artistic merit, such Well-Tempered Clavier (WTC) by Bach compared to an example of âpopularâ music, Strauss II and other examples. 33% of Higher Education Teachers preferred WTC, while none preferred Blue Danube. While 50.5% of manual workers preferred Blue Danube an none WTC.
48. Bourdieu and âDistinctionâ Bourdieu made a number of observations based upon this data, one of the most important being that taste in culture resemembled taste in food: Those with least capital buy essential items, items that are going to fill them up, while those with most capital can afford items that have symbolic status, but donât necessarily have significant nutitional value.
49. Bourdieu and âDistinctionâ In art this principle related to the kind of pleasure people would take from art. Popular culture was consumed by people who enjoyed it, who would watch a film for its emotional story line and narrative for example, while âHigh Cultureâ was consumed in a much more dispassionate fashion. For Bourdieu this signalled that those in power, the Bourgeois, indulged in art that was separated from social realities, that âHigh Artâsâ claim to aesthetic distance was in denial of the everyday reality and the inequality of the system under which it was produced.
50. Habitus âThe mechanism by which tastes are cultivated and exercised. The Habitus is the means by which people come to develop systems of likes and dislikes, and also the set of principles and procedures which people use in their relations with objects and people. In short it is the set of dispositions, for use in practice, that orientates individuals in their relations with people and objects in the shared world.â Iain Woodward (2007) Understanding Material Culture
51. How does this make you reflect upon your own sense of taste?
53. How is Bourdieu postmodern? Modernism was underwritten by a belief in pure, authentic, autonomous values(As we shall see taste was thought of in such terms).In Bourdieuâs work, as reflected in postmodern thought generally, ânaturalâ values are replaced by âcultural codesâ. Language âthe system that allows us to read and interpret information â is distributed, much like wealth, across society. As with money some people are in possession of the âcultural compentencesâ to freely engage art, to decode it. Bourdieurefered to this as cultural capital.
54. âA beholder who lacks the specific code feels lost on a chaos of sounds and rhythms, colours and lines, without rhyme or reason. Not having learnt to adopt the adequate disposition, he stops at what [Art Historian] Erwin Panofsky calls the âsensible propertiesâ, perceiving a skin as downy or lace-work as delicate, or at the emotional resonances of these properties, referring to âaustereâ colours or a âjoyful melodyâ.â Bourdieu (1989) p.2
58. Clement Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitch âRetiring from public altogether, the avant-garde poet or artist sought to maintain the high level of his art by both narrowing and raising it to the expression of an absolute in which all relativities and contradictions would either be resolved or beside the point... âArt for Artâsâ sake and âpure poetryâ appear, and subject matter or content becomes something to be avoided like a plague.â (Greenberg 1992, p.5)
59. Clement Greenberg: views on taste. âKitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates ... Insensitivity. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations.. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times [...] Formal culture has always belonged to the [powerful and cultivated]; while the [great mass of the exploited and poor] have had to content themselves with folk or rudimentary culture, or kitsch.â (Ibid, p. 10)
60. More on the avant-garde âAdvance or decline â these are the only alternatives. Impasse, in which there is neither advance nor decline, only uncertainty, is unimaginable in the logic of decadence. Worse yet if the decline of an art â representational painting, for example â seems to go on forever, because those eager to put it out of its misery, to hasten its death throes with their contempt and indifference, or at least teach it the agony it should feel, find they have no effect on it: it continues to be in good cheer as it goes about its creative business.â Donald Kuspit, The Dialectic of Decadence
61. Greenbergâs Modernist assumptions There is something universal about beauty. Artworks progress â through self-criticism â towards a particular point (flatness). Though direct (aesthetic) engagement with a work of art you can evaluate itâs success
62. The white cube Museum of Modern Art Building [centre] (2004). Designed by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward D. Stone in 1939 Tate Liverpool (2006)
64. Elite Institutions Both Moma and the Abstract Expressionism with which it became synonymous seemed to be exclusive, not just to working classes, but from women and ethnic minorities too.
65. Question after Bourdieu: Could Kant only imagine there to be a way of getting at a true, autonomous, universal beauty only because at that time in history ( mid to late18th Century) because the few ruling classes with the education to pass judgement were in a position of secure control and consensus? no such thing as transhistoric essence
68. Identifiying Kitsch, according to Thomas Kulka Kitsch depicts objects or themes that are highly charged with stock emotions. The objects or themes depicted by kitsch are instantly and effortlessly identifiable. Kitsch does not substantially enrich our associations relating to the depicted objects or themes.
77. âBadâ Painting âThis... Is the ironic nature of the title, âbadâ painting, which ... Is really âgoodâ painting. It is figurative work that defies, either deliberately or by virtue of disinterest, the classic canons of good taste, draftsmanship, acceptable sources material, rendering, or illusionistic representation. In other words, this is work that avoids the conventions of high art, either in terms of traditional art history or very recent taste of fashion.â Tucker in the Bad Painting Catalogue
78. âBadâ Painting âThe notion of progress usually associated with avant-garde ideas is in question here, given the openly nostalgic, figurative and art-historical character of the work.â Tucker in the Bad Painting Catalogue
79. Conceptual artsâ legacy: anti-aesthetic ââ... Postmodernism is not pluralism â the quixotic notion that all positions in culture and politics are now open and equal. This apocalyptic belief that anything goes, that the âend of ideologyâ is here, is simply the inverse of the fatalistic belief that nothing works, that we live under a âtotal systemâ without the hope of redress...â Hal Foster, 1985
80. Conceptual artsâ legacy: anti-aesthetic âIn opposition... a resistant position is concerned with a critical deconstruction of tradition, not an instrumental pastiche of pop â or pseudo - historical forms, with a critique of origins, not a return to them. In short, it seeks to question rather than exploit cultural codes, to explore rather than conceal social political affiliations.â Hal Foster, 1985
Today, the aim is to traverse Modern and contemporary art using the vehicle, or theme, of taste. And my hope is that this approach will prove to be very provocative and intimate and lead us to understand the complex phenomenon of postmodernism in a very palpable kind of way. I say âprovocative and intimateâ here because as [intro] La Rouchefout said âOur pride is more offended by attacks on our tastes than on our opinionsâ. To have you opinions dashed about a certain subject perhaps seems more external, more about a set of circumstances out their about which you held the opinion. But when someone attacks your taste they assault the status everything from you sense of dress to the way you decorate your home, to the way you have learnt to speak.
Taste is also a good way in to postmodernism because we can really consider taste without thinking about consumerism and the rise of popular culture. Certain ideas of taste put forward by âModernâ thinkers were confidently based upon the clear separation of âHigh Cultureâ and âpopular cultureâ, or to use more specialist language, between âavant-garde cultureâ and âkitschâ. But society has changed and now more and more people exercise taste, and though it could and should still be argued that certain groups are still privileged and still effectively have more power to dictate what is deemed good or bad, art has reflected an increasing convergence between an historically elite culture and âmass cultureâ. Andreas Hussein in his book âAfter the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and postmodernismâ insisted that understanding the relationship of High/Low culture was important that grasp the significant changes occuring since the 1960s.
There is much more to taste than fashion or street credibility. In fact, historically, taste has been closely linked to virtue. Being tasteful is taken to be a sign of your inner quality and the subject has often â and still can be â treated with a quite of piety. One of the most extreme examples of this attitude is captured in theories of the Austro-Hungarian architect Adolf Loos, writing at the beginning of the last century. For Loos, decoration is synonymous with moral deparvity; although it might be ok for âuncivilizedâ papuan peoples to decorate everything, he argued, for the Westerner it is an egregious act of vulgarity akin to acting like a child or applying graffitti to a toilet.Although Loos might seem so extreme, he was part of the modernist movement in art and design which still exerts a strong influence today.
The clean and clear interiors of Le Corbusier, the crisp metal work of Marianne Brandt working at the Bauhaus, the arts & crafts movement, defined a particular aesthetic sensibility that pervades culture at lots of different levels, from Ikea and Grand designs to shows like the Ideal home show.
In fine art, the idea of Beauty has been historically connected to truth. Of course, you have to be in possession of a faultless taste for things to appreciate beauty, a person of outstanding âcultivation and breedâ. Beauty in academic art, perhaps most closely linked to this idea of truth, was connected to classical themes of balance and harmony. Artists like Nicholas Poussin, studies by students attending the academies developing in most cities across Europe from the mid 18th Century, would learn to draw from casts and carefully design so that it possessed a certain correctness. Academies you might say, were an attempt to impose standards on taste, standards that Modern artists, like the impressionists, would be seen to resist and overturn.
At a very general â perhaps slightly wishy washy level â you might argue that for the most part of recorded history people have exhibited taste. But others, such as GilloDorfles, who wrote a famous anthology on Kitsch â art deems not to have any artistic merit, that taste is a modern phenomenon. This is because, he argues, art was previously in the service of religion. And in such service it had the status of facilitating worship, not of being judged for is visual merits. It is with Industrialization he thinks bad taste, and conversely, good taste, started to emerge. Postmodernism tends to be discussed in relation to consumerism rather than industry, but Dorfles description of what he means by industry, sound very postmodern. He sees the new industries as creating new platforms for the imagination, for capturing the imagination. With new media, such a photography and film he writes of a lask of âan âauthenticâ lived experienceâ â something postmodern philosophers like Jean Baudrillard would, some years later, discuss. âThe sight of reproduced images â via photography, cinema, television and magazines â is no longer capable of transmitting a truly lived experience.â But what is this experience?
Another interesting thing about taste, is itâs openess as a concept. Although we will obviously be focusing upon art today, taste gives us opportunity to discuss and draw upon all aspects of our experience and think carefully about the choices we as individuals make, regarding the books we read, the type of food we eat... (and hence the voting cards). And my hope is that today's course will give you more confidence to develop and stand by your own tastes in order to question and contest what is good and bad. And of course, the whole point of âbad paintingâ, as you will see, is to do just that â to ask questions. To say, wait a minute, but arenât the accepted notions of good taste actually highly restrictive? Isnât there scope to use to take interest in other things: more complex subject matter, more ambiguous painting style.Now Iâm sure that for everyone, this questioning is already something you do. Iâm sure youâve all felt pissed off at some point by someoneâs sense of taste. Whoâs been annoyed by the omission of a favourite film from a top ten listing?
What is good taste.
Rene Ricard, âArtists have a responsibility to their work to raise it above the vernacular. Perhaps it is the critic's job to sort out from the melee of popular style the individuals who define the style, who perhaps inaugurated itâ.
Rene Ricard, âArtists have a responsibility to their work to raise it above the vernacular. Perhaps it is the critic's job to sort out from the melee of popular style the individuals who define the style, who perhaps inaugurated itâ.
Rene Ricard, âArtists have a responsibility to their work to raise it above the vernacular. Perhaps it is the critic's job to sort out from the melee of popular style the individuals who define the style, who perhaps inaugurated itâ.
Rene Ricard, âArtists have a responsibility to their work to raise it above the vernacular. Perhaps it is the critic's job to sort out from the melee of popular style the individuals who define the style, who perhaps inaugurated itâ.
âWhat emerges [in Bourdieuâs work] is a field analysis of the way artists, writers, curators and gallery owners are mutually engaged in a symbiotic practice, the totality of which is âartâ. The state â politicians, ministers, museums and national galleries â is never far awayâ. Micheal Grenfell & Cheryl Hardy, Art Rules.
Another example of the kind of data gathered in âDistinctionâ are a number of table in which people were asked, Given the following subjects, is a photographer more likely to produce a beautiful, interesting, meaningless or ugly photoâ. On the subject of Sunset over Sea, 19.5% of people with high level qualifications thought it would be meaningless, compared to 1 % of those with no qualification. Conversely on the subject of Bark of a Tree, 8.5% of those with high qualifications thought it would be meaningless, compared to 46.5 % of those with none.
âWhereas the ideology of charisma regards taste in legitimate culture as a gift of nature, scientific observation shows that cultural needs are the product of upbringing and education.â
A satirical review from the time of the first exhibition of the works of this group reveals how difficult people found it to accept this new visual language. Except from Louis Leroyâs satirical take on the work of the Independent artists:Bertin's pupil, believing that I was being ironical, contented himself with shrugging his shoulders, not taking the trouble to answer. Then, very quietly, with my most naive air, I led him before the Ploughed Field of M. Pissarro. At the sight of this astounding landscape, the good man thought that the lenses of his spectacles were dirty. He wiped them carefully and replaced them on his nose."By Michalon!" he cried. "What on earth is that?""You see ... a hoarfrost on deeply ploughed furrows.""Those furrows? That frost? But they are palette-scrapings placed uniformly on a dirty canvas. It has neither head nor tail, top nor bottom, front nor back.""Perhaps ... but the impression is there.""Well, it's a funny impression!How is this not academic? (and therefore in many ways quite difficult for viewers at that time to understand)Landscape (requires less intelligent manipulation â not like staging a scene)Loose brushstrokes (in the academies lines were associated with reason, colour with sensuous, emotional (female) attributes.Concentration on the surface of the canvas
So far Iâve skimmed over the subtitle of Bourdieuâs book, âA social critique of the judgement of tasteâ. This directly references a work by the philopher Emanuel Kant, âCritique of Judgementâ (1790). Kant came at a point when the Enlightenment had been active for a century, but in that time aesthetics, that is the study of beauty had hardly been considered. Reason was the primary concern for philosophers as it could produce tangible things. Beauty however, was thought to be purely related to sensations and therefore irrational, fleeting, subjective. Kant argued that even though this may be the case, there was something objective about the way we might properly perceive beauty that was important. Sensations, he argued, animate parts of our mind or soul that precede our ideas of the world. In looking at a Rothko, for example, you might argue that you feel the sensation of something that you only afterwards â using your imagination â call âhotâ or âmedativeâ. The words come only later. But for Kant, an appreciation of Beauty was more complex than even this.
In order to appreciate Beauty, he argued, itâs not enough just to experience sensations. Rather, you have to get in to a state by which your imagination directly connects those sensations to your understanding. In this way before the concepts âhotâ or âmeditativeâ come to mind you understand the sensation. You become conscious without concepts (and there is something akin to Eastern philosophy here). But the irony is however, that Kant effectively tried to reason and write in concepts, and categorise and prescribe, exactly how this âappreciationâ was to happen. And this, as you might be guessing, can become dogmatic. And my choice of Rothko here is no accident, because Kantâs conception of aesthetics lends itself perfectly to abstract painting, where subject matter is erased to allow you to be aware purely of your own conscious observance of a piece. And when you start to think through the implication of Kantâs arguments, a whole host of other behaviours and dispositions are made legitimate by his aesthetics. You canât get caught up in the stories contained in a picture, you canât run through a gallery, or get distracted by the decor of the gallery and of course, returning to Bourdieu, you canât do any of this unless youâve been trained to.
Keeping in mind our description of aesthetics, and basically the kind of disposition it hinted at, and Greenbergâs understanding of art, it probably become obvious how the White Cube came in to being. To service an art that was, according to such and influential critic as Greenberg, in a place in cultural ascendency, namely American, and specifically New York.âThe Museum interior was turned into antiseptic, laboratory-like spaces â enclosed, isolated, artificially illuminated and apparently neutral environments in which viewers could study works of art displayed as so many isolated specimensâ (Wallach 1992 [1991], p. 282)
Later, the shareholders of Moma were also implicated in the War in Vietnam, which in the politically charged environment of 1960s America led to protests from political activists and artists, who were political activists.What Iâm trying to give you a glimpse of here is how, in fact, the inequality exposed by Bourdieu, was in effect being explosed and critiqued in many other ways at that time. By the 60s the type of art Greenberg had supported was seeming conventional, and worse yet, part of the establishment, an outgrowth of a discriminatory type of archaic, aristocratic attitude that no longer had a place in the world.
If Kantâs ideas underlie Modernism, via thinkers like Greenberg, then if we accept that they are off there time â as Bourdieu suggests we do â when there was a particular social configuration then when that configuration changes significantly, those ideas will breakdown. By the 60s artists were making installations, performance art, video art, body art... Things had opened up immensely. After Kant, the French Revolution. The modern period in fact was defined by change, and Marx predicted that industrialisation would overturn old social orders. Was it that by the 60s the old hierarchy of high and low was breaking down? Was art and culture becoming more democratic? Or, did society just reshuffle and make new sense of itself and a different kind of people take control?
Kitsch is thought to have its root in Romanticism, which elevated emotion to an almost spiritual level and, as in this work, focused upon the individual. This work shows the private experiences of someone reading books and the idea of personal enlightenment is hinted at by the light cast upon the wall.
GilloDorfles âThe sight of reproduced images â via photography, cinema, television and magazines â is no longer capable of transmitting a truly lived experience.â But what is this experience? Well now, after our journey, perhaps we can say that âTruly lived experienceâ sounds a bit aesthetic. Perhaps what was lost with tv etc. was not lost because those media fabricate false ideas, but because they propagate ideas, they bring art and culture to the masses.
Consumerism replaces industrialism.
Pop art fulfils all Greenbergâs criteria for Kitch. It is the product of collecting, of sourcing reproductions. Like dada and surrealism â though without the underlying politics â it colleagues worlds together meaning that instead of getting a unified asthetic kind of experience, your get a kind of kaleidoscope of different types of information. And what code do you need to decode it, well... Exactly the same as you do to decode popular culture, the newspapers, tvs and magazines that it comes from. For conservatives kitsch is a symtom of a move towards some pathological state, a neurosis, an evil.
This is about culture
KosuthâsArt After Philosophy (1969) was on of the most puritanical attempt to define conceptual art. For him, art is a tautology â i.e. It states âI am a work of artâ. This shows his proximity to the thinking of various minimalists, particularly Donald Judd who said âItâs art if I say it isâ. He argues that there is no conceptual reason that art has to be tied to aesthetics. Also, One and Three Chairs (1965).Kosuth is very critical of formalist criticism and argues that it rest solely upon taste, while reducing the work of art to mere decoration. To make conventional forms of art, i.e. Painting of sculpture, is to accept the ânature of artâ (Kosuth [1969] 1991, p.18) âThe value of particular artists after Duchamp can be weighed according to how much they questioned the nature of artâ (Ibid.). For this reason he argues that âActual works of art are little more than historical curiosities.â p.19There is something quite dogmatic about Kosuthâs essay however, and it is very reliant upon the proximity of meaning and written language. The visual aspect of the art is being seen as secondary.âThe âpurestâ definition of conceptual art would be that it is inquiry into the foundations of the concept âartâ, as it has come to mean.â p.26There is also a sense here that the material aspects of the reality of conceptual art are being denied.Exhibition opens on 7 August at Talbot Rice gallery.The same year Robert Barry created his closed exhibition piece.
For our discussion, conceptual art enters as a kind of antithesis to aesthetics. This is an art not defined by styles â or a least it wasnât thought of that way at the time. Also, if good taste and bad taste are wound up with consumable products, then here is an idea for an immaterial art. Something that exists in the mind.
We will return to Conceptual Art shortly. Letâs just say for now, that in this milieu people were starting to question the legitimacy of painting at all. Had all painting, figurative or not become decadent? For Marcia Tucker, who organised the exhibition âBad Paintingâ in 1978 in the New Museum in New York, the idea of painting was still full of possibilities, but it had to free itself from certain constraints in order to realise them. Working the art scene for some time, Tucker had met a bunch of painters who seemed to break all the rules of good taste and deal with subject matter in a way that was very unfashionable at the time. It was figurative, it dealt with personal subject matter â painters painting their children â for example, or pets, and it was done in an awkward style. Tuckerâs friends were somewhat distressed when she announced her idea of exhibiting these artists works, but she felt it was wholley justified.