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Description: The Language of Twentieth-Century Art: A Conceptual History
This is the third book in a series addressing the interrelations of art, philosophy, experience, and history. The other works are my Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, and Art and Embodiment: From Aesthetics to Self-Consciousness, both Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993. The...
PublisherYale University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00150.002
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Preface
This is the third book in a series addressing the interrelations of art, philosophy, experience, and history.1 The other works are my Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, and Art and Embodiment: From Aesthetics to Self-Consciousness, both Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993. The present work was previously conjectured as Philosophy in Art. There will be another entitled Defining Experience Defining Art. I shall begin by outlining the fundamental argument that runs throughout the project.
It hinges on an answer to the question, why does art have a history? The conventional art-historian might reply as follows. Pictorial representation lends itself to an enormously diverse variety of functions which can change over time. It is this dimension of change which constitutes art’s history. To interpret its structures, the historian must deploy strategies of technical and iconographical decoding and genealogical analysis. (The latter strategy is especially influential at the moment. It seeks to analyse the structure of pictorial artefacts in terms of their significance vis-à-vis gender, class, and power relations.)
This answer has only a partial validity, for whilst it addresses art’s having a history, it does not address the actual basis of that historicity. What is it about pictorial representation that allows it to be used for so many different purposes by so many different human beings in so many different times and places?
One obvious answer is that pictorial representation as a symbolic code is easily learnt and applied. But again one must ask, what makes that possible? And even if a satisfactory explanation can be offered, it must be broad enough to answer a further question, namely, what gives such representation its compelling character, its capacity to inspire the belief that it can fulfill the complex ritual, religious and persuasive functions which are so often assigned to it?
The significance of these questions is in their negation of the present. They burst open the current dogma that art is fundamentally a socially specific historical construct, determined by gender, race, and class. They point us to the fact that when iconography and genealogy have been given their due, the issue of the fundamental historicity of art remains. Too often this is obscured through a one-sided distinction between the historical and the ‘ahistorical’. This is the main distinction which must be overcome.
The proper direction to travel in this respect is signposted in these remarks by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Theodor Adorno (respectively): ‘It is the expressive operation begun in the least perception, which amplifies into painting and art.’2 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neil, Heinemann, London, 1974, p. 83. ‘It is as if [art] were re-enacting the process through which the subject comes painfully into being.’3 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1984, p. 165. On these terms, we must see artistic representation as exemplifying decisive aspects of the structure of self-consciousness itself. It is this theme which I have explored in previous volumes in the series, and will develop much further in the present work. Specifically, I will be concerned with the basis of meaning in certain twentieth-century works of visual art and, in particular, how the artists’ use or anticipation of philosophical ideas enables them to generate objectively significant visual meanings – that is, ones that can be recognized through a work’s phenomenal qualities and its relation to other works. These meanings are founded on reciprocal relations which are presupposed by any possible experience. However, the ways in which individual artists formulate and apply them is a function of their own historically specific circumstances and theoretical positions. My investigation will address this interaction of experiential constants with the historically specific. It will be a conceptual history.
The title of my book mentions twentieth-century art. However, sculpture is rarely discussed in the course of the text. I have nevertheless retained the more general title because my basic thesis can be applied with little modification to twentieth-century sculpture. Where pressing questions do arise is in the context of extreme conceptions of sculpture, such as certain forms of minimal art, or installation and assemblage works. These shall be addressed in the text, especially the last two.
A great debt of thanks is owed to Andrew Harrison for his probing critical comments on an earlier version of this book. I have also benefited from discussion over the years with Martin Kemp, Christina Lodder, Michael Podro, John Richardson, Carolyn Wilde, Andrew Benjamin, Patrick Gardiner and Peter Suchin. Much of the argument in the present volume has been shaped by work done as part of a project entitled ‘The Contemporary Status of Art as a Form of Knowledge’. This was funded by the Slovenian Ministry of Science and Technology. The critical comments of my co-participants – Lars-Olof Aåhlberg and Aleš Erjavec – have been especially useful. Chapters 8, 9 and 10, indeed, are in part a sustained response to Erjavec.
Chapter 3 was originally published under the title ‘Philosophy and Non-Objectivity’ in the special Malevich issue of Art and Design, September, 1989, pp. 50–54; Chapter 7 was published as ‘Barnett Newman and the Sublime’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 7, 1984, pp. 52–9; Chapter 10 was published as ‘The Postmodern Sublime: Installation and Assemblage Art’, in ‘The Contemporary Sublime’ issue of Art and Design, February, 1995, pp. 9–17. All these essays have now been significantly revised and extended. Chapter 7 is a revised and extended version of a paper originally read to the Staff/Postgraduate Art History Seminar, 1983, in the University of St Andrews. I am indebted to participants in that seminar for their comments, particularly Martin Kemp, Mostyn Bramley-Moore and Louise Durning. Chapter 9 was originally presented at the ‘Copying’ colloquium held at the Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, in October 1991. I am indebted to participants for their comments.
 
1      The other works are my Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, and Art and Embodiment: From Aesthetics to Self-Consciousness, both Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993. The present work was previously conjectured as Philosophy in Art. There will be another entitled Defining Experience Defining Art»
2      Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neil, Heinemann, London, 1974, p. 83. »
3      Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1984, p. 165. »