1. Week 7 American Modernisms continued Japanese and Brazilian Modernism 1950-1955
2. The Art of Beholding Norman Rockwell, The Connoisseur , 1962 Martin Parr, Small World: Grand Canyon, USA , 1994
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14. Gutai & Iconoclasm Kazuo Shiraga Challenge to the Mud 1955 Saburo Murakami Passing Through 1956 Atsuko Tanaka, Electric Dress , 1956
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Editor's Notes
In order to understand the comprehensive aims of the mid-century abstract painters, it’s necessary to ground their work in experience, whether it be the experience we have in front of a work of art, meaning the actual physical experience of standing in front of a painting, as a connoisseur might do, or the experience of beholding a thing, a vast expanse of scenery laid out before you. As we briefly discussed last week, the word sublime is often used to describe the experience of looking at the monumental works of the mid-century American abstract painters, as well as, and even more so, monumental natural scenery. The aspect of the sublime suggests a quality of greatness or vastness so overwhelming in its meaning or physical presence that one may become dumbfounded in the face of it. But, more fundamentally, it implies that what’s most important about this moment is not the internal aesthetic value of the object itself, but the interaction happening at that time between the object and its viewer. The key idea here is “experience,” which governs not only much of the production of art during the second-half of the century, but how this art is received by its audience. What action did the artist perform in the creative process and how does it act upon you as a viewer?
By the 1950s, the sublime had been addressed in art and philosophy (in the writings of the enlightenment philosophers, Kant and Burke), and in painting, and it returns again here in abstract painting, particularly in the work of Barnett Newman.
What Newman is really privileging is the experience of looking, and of being, standing alone in front of this vast expanse of nothingness, or of everything, without “memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth.” It’s about giving the beholder a “sense of place” a sense of his/her own “scale”
The irony of some mid-century American abstraction is that in their desire to begin again in painting, to “start from scratch, to paint as if painting never existed before” in the words of Newman, they often returned to the original forms, the original stories that had influenced artists for centuries—allusions to creation myths, both Biblical ( Adam and Eve , the first books of Genesis) and pagan (Greek mythology), can be found in some of their works, albeit now they don’t take concrete or representational form. They’ve become abstracted.
Gutai “literalized” Rosenberg’s ideas on action painting – art as an “arena for action” and in doing this, their work revived Dadaist and Futurist performative practices and set the stage for Fluxus and Happenings of the 60s
