Some philosophers have recently suggested that the reason mathematics is useful in science is that it expands our expressive capacities. Of these philosophers, only Stephen Yablo has put forward a detailed account of how mathematics brings this advantage. In this article, I set out Yablo’s view and argue that it is implausible. Then, I introduce a simpler account and show it is a serious rival to Yablo’s. 1 Introduction2 Yablo’s Expressionism3 Psychological Objections to Yablo’s Expressionism4 Introducing Belief Expressionism5 Objections and (...) Replies5.1 Yablo’s likely response5.2 Charity6 Conclusion. (shrink)

The emergence of Abstract Expressionism as a predominant artistic style in the early 1950s was accompanied by a new critical image of the artist as a heroic individualist. This myth, according to which the artist created great works primarily by looking into the profound depths of his own soul rather than by responding to the world and society around him, has become the standard description of the Abstract-Expressionist artistic process. By such an account, the Abstract-Expressionist artist (...) was an apolitical being, unconcerned with the conflicts in society due to his overriding concern with the explorations of the self. This treatment of Abstract Expressionism began with the writing of two critics, Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. (shrink)

The question of what kind of city we are trying to have is an urgent one as the world continues its dramatic urbanization. Urban Visions presumes that an understanding of our urban experience is a prerequisite for envisioning what the city could be. In assembling work by distinguished authors from different disciplines and countries, Urban Visions offers a patient examination of what urban experience is and of the city’s necessity, with explicit and implicit propositions about what it could be. The (...) book is illustrated in full color. (shrink)

Central concepts and consensus views in clinical ethics are marked by instability. The papers in this number of the Journal take up two such central concepts, quality of life and moral status, and two such consensus views, that germ-line gene transfer should not be undertaken for the purposes of enhancement of human traits and that the ethical obligation of physicians to treat HIV infected patients rests on consent of the physician. One outcome of these philosophical investigations is that these two (...) concepts and consensus views are less stable than one might have thought. I explore the possibility of generalizing this outcome in a reflection on clinical ethics as the management of instability and incompleteness, including the instability and incompleteness of clinical ethics itself. In the course of this reflection I liken clinical ethics to abstract expressionism in mid-twentieth century Western art. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Quest for the Historical Abstract ExpressionismDaniel A. SiedellAbstract Expressionism:The International Context, by Joan Marter and David Anfam. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007, 320 pp. $26.95, paper.Abstract Expressionism, by Debra Bricker Balken. London: Tate, 2005, 80 pp. $9.60, paper.Reading Abstract Expressionism: Context and Critique, by Ellen Landau. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005, 768 pp. $45.00, paper.What makes any definition (...) of a movement in art dubious is that it never fits the deepest artists in the movement—certainly not as well as, if successful, it does the others.—Harold Rosenberg, 1952From the moment of its inception in the 1940s, "Abstract Expressionism" has been the subject of reframings, redefinitions, and revisions. This is because it is more than the sum total of artworks and artists traditionally recognized as part of the movement. It is a constitutive part of postwar American cultural life, and it has shaped how we understand art and the role of the artist. It has also shaped the practice of art criticism and defined the role of the art critic. Because it is part of the United States' creation myth of a distinctive postwar "American identity," it also possesses significant symbolic value. And this symbolic value is why it has been such a popular subject for art museum exhibitions for nearly half a century. The fact that in the last ten to fifteen years, major art museums have mounted major exhibitions of the work of key figures in the movement, like Jackson Pollock (including a feature film starring Ed Harris), Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Barnett Newman, and that auction prices for these artists reach tens of millions of dollars, suggest that, no matter how contested and complicated the concept of "Abstract Expressionism" is, the artists associated with the movement remain relevant.1Abstract Expressionism is not merely big business for museums, collectors, and auction houses. It has also been big business for scholars. The symbolic power of Abstract Expressionism and its influence on shaping and [End Page 107] forming contemporary artistic and critical practice has made the movement an important subject for historical and critical scrutiny. The publication of Irving Sandler's The Triumph of American Painting in 1970 was the first book-length study on Abstract Expressionism, and it marked the gradual beginning of the movement's transformation from a living entity to a more reified subject palatable for academic inquiry. Blending Alfred H. Barr's formalism with an historian's interest in subject matter and iconography and a critic's access to the artists, The Triumph of American Painting provided a taxonomy of sources and influences. Sandler's book, in part, provoked the publication of Serge Guilbaut's How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art in 1983 (written in 1978 as a doctoral dissertation), which initiated nearly fifteen years of serious and provocative scholarship on Abstract Expressionism. Guilbaut's radical revisionist approach to the subject—which sought to reinterpret the entire development of Abstract Expressionism as an aesthetic weapon of the Cold War—provoked a slew of responses from art historians eager to either jump on the careening bandwagon of Marxist social histories of modern art or hunker down in the trenches to protect hard-won scholarly turf. The latter was the response of a loose federation of art historians eager to forge a scholarly orthodoxy. This emergent paradigm is revealed in a 1988 special issue of Art Journal called "Abstract Expressionism: New and Improved," coedited by Stephen Polcari and Ann Gibson. This issue included essays by those art historians who understood themselves as part of a "new generation" of scholars characterized by their collective desire to transcend the polemics and limitations of those critics and curators whose distorted picture of the movement would be restored to clarity through scholarly distance, a distance that a "new synthesis" of Abstract Expressionist "art, culture, history, and society together, not separately" would produce.2 Sandler and Guilbaut were swiftly dismissed by these art historians of the "new and improved," the former because of his formalism and close proximity to the artists—many of whom he knew personally—the latter because of his Marxism... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Enchantment of Art: Abstraction and Empathy from German Romanticism to ExpressionismDavid MorganA familiar tradition since the eighteenth century has invested art with the power to heal a decadent human condition. Inheriting this ability from religion—the romantic enthusiast Wilhelm Wackenroder considered artistic inspiration to originate in “divine inspiration” in the case of his hero, Raphael 1 —art eventually replaced institutionalized belief in an evolutionary schedule of cultural development (...) determined by German idealism. Hegel, for instance, theorized the evolution of spirit from religion to art as a qualitative advancement over time. Rejecting the metaphysics of German idealism, Friedrich Nietzsche nevertheless contended that “Art raises its head where religions decline.” By assuming the “feelings and moods” of religion which had been dismantled by enlightenment, Nietzsche claimed that art gave new form to the life of feeling and imbued human endeavors with a “loftier, darker coloration.” 2 In the early twentieth century Wassily Kandinsky believed that the “spiritual in art” was the historical manifestation of an “inner necessity” that was in itself timeless and universal. Kandinsky portrayed the “life of the spirit” as “a large acute-angled triangle divided horizontally into unequal parts.” In a kind of “trickle down” aesthetic, the compartments of the triangle move slowly upward toward the apex, which is inhabited by the solitary genius of an age whose vision gradually elevates all those who occupy the lower stages. 3 [End Page 317]The point for proponents of the spiritual in art from romanticism to expressionism (and beyond) was to find in works of art what can best be described as an enchantment. 4 As the negotiation of the gaps or disjunctures separating human beings from complete power over their lives, enchantment conjoins the plane of immediate human experience to a desirable state of affairs through the mediation of such symbolic devices as rituals, incantations, or charms. Thus, evil can be warded off by the use of an apotropaic amulet, and fertility can be enhanced by the recitation of a suitable prayer or the performance of a certain ritual. In a modern analogy a sense of impotence is often alleviated by a trip to the mall where the bored therapeutically lose themselves in symbolic acts of self-renewing consumption. In the traditions of philosophy and science, systems of representation such as astrology, the microcosm, the harmony of the spheres, the great chain of being, the celestial hierarchies, or the mechanisms of theurgy and divination situate humanity within a cosmos that follows a particular order accessible to and in some degree manipulable by human beings. Enchantment consists of an apparatus of belief whose form of representation or enactment is thought to exert influence over the realities it configures.But enchantment is not limited to the spells and magic of premodern metaphysics (or modern consumerism). By means of religion, morality, and aesthetics, Nietzsche once averred, “man likes to believe that... he is touching the heart of the world.” 5 This study will focus on the manner in which art as constructed within the idealist tradition of German art theory functioned as an enchantment. Specifically, it will explore what the history of ideas about abstraction and empathy has to tell us about the spiritualization or enchantment of art. After identifying the philosophical and aesthetic wherewithal of enchantment in nineteenth-century Germany, attention focusses on Franz Marc’s early twentieth-century theorization of abstraction. It is certainly more customary to study Kandinsky, whose writings and early efforts at abstraction are much better known, but Marc’s ideas offer more immediate connections to German intellectual history and clarify the aims of his abstract art as a strategy of enchantment. Moreover, Marc was unusually articulate and wrote often, exploring ideas and artistic efforts with great insight. Focusing on Marc therefore offers a corrective to the historiography that has favored Kandinsky’s writings. Finally, Marc differed from his Russian friend over the cause of the war. Manifesting a difference that is portentous for this study, Kandinsky left Germany for Russia in 1914, while Marc enthusiastically took up arms for the fatherland. Given these circumstances and the unfortunate tendency of art historians to valorize expressionist art rather than situate it in the ideological context of... (shrink)

This may be an especially favorable moment in intellectual history to come to some understanding of notions like “abstraction” and “the abstract,” if only because these terms seem so clearly obsolete, even antiquated, at the present time. The obsolescence of abstraction is exemplified most vividly by its centrality in a period of cultural history that is widely perceived as being just behind us, the period of modernism, ranging roughly from the beginning of the twentieth century to the aftermath of (...) the Second World War.1art is now a familiar feature of our cultural landscape; it has become a monument to an era that is passing from living memory into history. The experiments of cubism and abstract expressionism are no longer “experimental” or shocking: abstraction has not been associated with the artistic avant-garde for at least a quarter of a century, and its central masterpieces are now firmly entrenched in the tradition of Western painting and safely canonized in our greatest museums. That does not mean that there will be no more abstract paintings, or that the tradition is dead; on the contrary, the obsolescence we are contemplating is in a very precise sense the precondition for abstraction’s survival as a tradition that resists any possible assault from an avant-garde. Indeed, the abstract probably has more institutional and cultural power as a rearguard tradition than it ever did as an avant-garde overturning of tradition. For that very reason its self-representations need to be questioned more closely than ever, especially its account of its own nature and history. This seems important, not just to set the record straight about what abstract art was, but to enable critical and artistic experimentation in the present, and a more nuanced account of both pre-and postmodern at, both of which are in danger of being swallowed up by the formulas of abstract formalism. If art and criticism are to continue to play an oppositional and interventionist role in our time, passive acceptance and reproduction of a powerful cultural tradition like abstract art will simply not do. 1. I define modernism and “the age of abstraction” here in familiar art historical terms, as a period extending from Kandinsky and Malevich to Jasper Johns and Morris Louis. There are other views of this matter which would trace modernism back to the emergence of an avant-garde in the 1840s , or to romanticism , or to the eighteenth century . My claim would be that “the abstract” as such only becomes a definitive slogan for modernism with the emergence of abstract painting around 1900. W. J. T. Mitchell, editor of Critical Inquiry, is professor of English and a member of the Committee on Art and Design at the University of Chicago. His most recent book is Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. (shrink)

When painter Fritz Janschka arrived from Vienna to teach at Byrn Mawr College in October, 1949, he entered a culture seemingly as alien to his art as one can imagine. Janschka is one of the co­founders of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, a group of painters who studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna shortly after World War Two. The fantastic realists cultivated a precisely controlled craft informed by traditional methods and modernist sensibilities, incorporating collectively the entire (...) range of Western painting, past and present, in their attempts to come to grips with a shattered world. New York Abstract Expressionism and Viennese Fantastic Realism, two mid-twentieth century art movements, represent diametrically opposed ways of painting, yet both schools sprang out of surrealism. The Fantastic Realists were widely known in Europe and hardly known in America. Given the dominant abstractionist tendencies of post-World War Two art this is understandable. For these reasons Janschka’s openness to the techniques of the New York School in the early 1950s forms an unlikely meeting point of seemingly irreconcilable positions, one suggestive of possibilities for the meeting of abstraction and figuration, and more broadly, for addressing contemporary dehumanizing abstractionism, which I discuss in this essay. (shrink)

Wilhelm Worringer's landmark study in the interpretation of modern art, first published in 1908, has seldom been out of print. Its profound impact not only on art historians and theorists but also for generations of creative writers and intellectuals is almost unprecedented. Starting from the notion that beauty derives from our sense of being able to identify with an object, Worringer argues that representational art produces satisfaction from our "objectified delight in the self," reflecting a confidence in the world as (...) it is--as in Renaissance art. By contrast, the urge to abstraction, as exemplified by Egyptian, Byzantine, primitive, or modern expressionist art, articulates a totally different response to the world: it expresses man's insecurity. Thus in historical periods of anxiety and uncertainty, man seeks to abstract objects from their unpredictable state and transform them into absolute, transcendental forms. Abstraction and Empathy also has a sociological dimension, in that the urge to create fixed, abstract, and geometric forms is a response to the modern experience of industrialization and the sense that individual identity is threatened by a hostile mass society. Hilton Kramer's introduction considers the influence of Worringer's thesis and places his book in historical context. (shrink)

본 논문은 칸딘스키의 추상표현주의와 추상예술론에 함의된 니체의 철학을 고찰함으로써 칸딘스키 추상미술에 담긴 존재론적 측면을 논증하는 내용을 담고 있다. 칸딘스키는 추상미술의 선구자이자 추상표현주의를 통해 전통미술에 대한 해체와 전복을 시도한다. 이와 동시에 예술과 삶에 대한 정신적 전환의 깨우침을 준다. 이와 같은 칸딘스키의 창조적 시도는 내적 필연성을 통해 가능한데 그 배후에는 니체의 위버멘쉬가 자리하고 있다. 칸딘스키는 그의 저서에서 니체의 가치의 전도, 힘에의 의지, 위버멘쉬를 직·간접적으로 드러낸다. 예술에 대한 니체의 정의는 전통적 예술개념의 해체와 확장, 파괴와 창조에 있고 이는 삶의 법칙과도 연관한다. 칸딘스키의 예술론에 담긴 (...) 위버멘쉬의 형상은 추상표현주의를 통해 현현하고 이는 현대미술의 확장에 지대한 영향을 끼친다. (shrink)

ABSTRACT‘expressionist’ accounts of applied mathematics seek to avoid the apparent Platonistic commitments of our scientific theories by holding that we ought only to believe their mathematics-free nominalistic content. The notion of ‘nominalistic content’ is, however, notoriously slippery. Yablo's account of non-catastrophic presupposition failure offers a way of pinning down this notion. However, I argue, its reliance on possible worlds machinery begs key questions against Platonism. I propose instead that abstract expressionists follow Geoffrey Hellman's lead in taking the assertoric (...) content of empirical science to be irreducibly modal, using the ‘non-interference’ of mathematical objects as justification for detaching nominalistic consequences. (shrink)

In the 1980s, when the American art market flourished, critics were heavily concerned with theory. In T_he Aesthete in the City_ David Carrier offers a personal view on the artistic activity of that decade. He begins with a theoretical perspective on the relationship between two very different forms of artwriting: art criticism and art history writing. Carrier surveys the developments within theory during the 1980s, focusing on constructive critical analysis of the then fashionable work of Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, T. (...) J. Clark, and Jacques Derrida. He provides detailed accounts of a number of painters, among them Thomas Nozkowski, David Reed, and Sean Scully, whose development he followed closely. Carrier argues that the greatest American artistic tradition,Expressionism, provides the basis for an ongoing tradition of abstract painting, a rich system whose potential has not yet been exhausted. Carrier's earlier work was concerned with a philosophical study of the methods of art criticism. This book turns to the theory and practice of art criticism, concentrating on a concrete discussion of individual theorists and artists. (shrink)

This essay examines Ricœur’s mimetic and transfigurative perspective on non-objective art and adopts it as an idiom for examining Mark Rothko’s artistic intention in the multiform canvases of his “classical” period from 1949 until his death in 1970. Rothko unequivocally denied being an abstractionist, a colorist, or a formalist, insisting, on the contrary, that he desired to communicate discrete dimensions of experience and emotions to his viewers, specifically, experiences of the sacred and the spiritual. His large canvases, with their blurred (...) edges, force the spectator into an intimacy of experience that opens the potentiality of heterogeneous interpretations. In other words, one might consider his paintings to be metaphors of dense meanings that imitate reality, not through facile representation, but through a Kierkegaardian repetition of worlds that track Ricœur’s own ideas of prefiguration, configuration, and re-figuration. I contend in this essay that Rothko’s “abstract expressionism” adequately illustrates Ricœur’s contention that non-figurative art succeeds far better than representational art in refiguring new worlds of meaning. (shrink)

In this classic collection of wide-ranging and interdisciplinary essays, Stanley Cavell explores a remarkably broad range of philosophical issues from politics and ethics to the arts and philosophy. The essays explore issues as diverse as the opposing approaches of 'analytic' and 'Continental' philosophy, modernism, Wittgenstein, abstract expressionism and Schoenberg, Shakespeare on human needs, the difficulties of authorship, Kierkegaard and post-Enlightenment religion. Presented in a fresh twenty-first century series livery, and including a specially commissioned preface, written by Stephen Mulhall, (...) illuminating its continuing importance and relevance to philosophical enquiry, this influential work is now available for a new generation of readers. (shrink)

Resumen: Partiendo del texto clásico Vanguardia y kitsch, nos proponemos analizar la obra del crítico norteamericano Clement Greenberg. Después de la intervención del Estado norteamericano en el arte entre 1935 y 1943, Clement Greenberg surge como uno de los principales críticos que buscaron unificar el “arte elevado” de ese país. Para tanto, el crítico norteamericano busca justificar el nivel artístico de esa vanguardia acercando esa producción a las vanguardias europeas, especialmente el cubismo. Veremos los problemas de Greenberg al forjar una (...) “historicidad inmanente” a las obras de arte para justificar una posible convergencia de las vanguardias europeas en el nuevo contexto de la vanguardia norteamericana: el “expresionismo abstracto”. Greenberg, con ayuda del MoMA y del Estado norteamericano buscó fomentar una “pintura a la americana”, una vanguardia conocida como escuela de Nueva York. Buscamos analizar el contexto en que se forjó esa tendencia artificiosamente unificada y cómo el pop art emerge como una crítica performática de ese contexto. Más que vanagloriarse de sus métodos técnicos, el pop art busca subvertir el contexto de recepción del arte que hasta entonces era expectante del “arte serio y elevado” defendido por Greenberg.: Starting from the classic text Avant-garde and kitsch, we propose to analyze the work of the North American critic Clement Greenberg. After the US state intervention in the arts between 1935 and 1943, Clement Greenberg emerged as one of the main critics who sought to unify the “high art” of that country. The critic attempted to justify the artistic level of the American avant-garde by bringing it closer to the European avant-gardes, especially Cubism. We will see Greenberg’s problems in forging an “immanent historicity” of works of art in order to justify a possible convergence of the European avant-garde in the new context of an American avant-garde of “abstract expressionism”. Greenberg, with the help of the MoMA and the American government, sought to promote an “American painting”, a vanguard known as the New York school. We seek to analyze the context in which this artificially unified tendency was forged, and to analyze how pop art emerged as a performance critique of that context. More than boasting of its technical methods, pop art sought to subvert the context of the reception of art that until then expected the “serious and high art” defended by Greenberg. (shrink)

The twentieth century began with the deconstruction of the image, as it is ending with the effort to restore it. Cubism, dada, and abstract expressionism took apart what, in their various ways, pop art, magic realism, and neoexpressionism have tried to put back together. Tonality in music and narrative in literature have undergone similar change.1 What has been at stake in each case has been the redefinition of a center, a normative or ordering principle as such. Yeats intuited (...) this general phenomenon in his famous observation that “the center cannot hold,” and though whether one applauds or, with Yeats, condemns the result, it is undeniable that the crisis of contemporary culture has been in large part experienced as a deprivation of norms.This sense of deprivation has been most apparent in the plastic arts. The fashioning of images has been one of the primary impulses of human art. It has been the basis of most systems of visual representation and constitutes the earliest record we have off art itself. Its loss or abandonment has been in good part responsible for the bewilderment and hostility much of the general public continues to express toward modern art.The experience of this loss, however, has not been confined to the public alone. For many artists, the sense of modern art’s expressive potential has been tempered by an anxiety about its ultimate direction.2 For these artists, the image had not been transcended but rather rendered inaccessible, and implicitly or explicitly they sought its restoration. At the same time, they were keenly aware that there could be no return to exhausted modes of representation, no looking back except as parody or quotation.3 1. Among the studies comparing changes across the arts in the early twentieth century are Georges Edouard Lemaître, From Cubism to Surrealism in French Literature , and Bram Dijkstra, The Hieroglyphics of a New Speech: Cubism, Stieglitz, and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams . More recently, visualization in cubist art and relativity theory has been compared in Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art . For a general overview, see Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 . Marxist critics, notably Walter Benjamin, have long insisted on the relationship between modernism in the arts and the crisis of the traditional order.2. This is clearly visible in the work and writing of pioneers such as Kandinsky and Klee or, to take a later case, Adolph Gottlieb. The correspondence between Kandinsky and Schönberg is illuminating as well.3. Much of the neoimagistic art of the past twenty-five years falls into these categories, and thus signals a prolongation rather than a resolution of the crisis. Pop art was clearly an art of parody, while work of an artist such as Malcolm Morley might almost be taken as an illustration of Benjamin’s thesis about the work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction. His “imitations,” like those of Robert Lowell in verse, betray a deep anxiety about mastery and tradition. Much the same can be said for such musical compositions as Lukas Foss’ “Baroque Variations” and “Phorion” or Luciano Berio’s “Sinfonia,” to name but a random few among many. Robert Zaller is professor of history and head of the department of history and politics at Drexel University. He was formerly on the faculties of Queens College , the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Miami. His books include The Parliament of 1621: A Study in Constitutional Conflict and The Cliffs of Solitude: A Reading of Robinson Jeffers. (shrink)

Over a decade ago, Arthur Danto announced that art ended in the sixties. Ever since this declaration, he has been at the forefront of a radical critique of the nature of art in our time. After the End of Art presents Danto's first full-scale reformulation of his original insight, showing how, with the eclipse of abstract expressionism, art has deviated irrevocably from the narrative course that Vasari helped define for it in the Renaissance. Moreover, he leads the way (...) to a new type of criticism that can help us understand art in a posthistorical age where, for example, an artist can produce a work in the style of Rembrandt to create a visual pun, and where traditional theories cannot explain the difference between Andy Warhol's Brillo Box and the product found in the grocery store. Here we are engaged in a series of insightful and entertaining conversations on the most relevant aesthetic and philosophical issues of art, conducted by an especially acute observer of the art scene today.Originally delivered as the prestigious Mellon Lectures on the Fine Arts, these writings cover art history, pop art, "people's art," the future role of museums, and the critical contributions of Clement Greenberg--who helped make sense of modernism for viewers over two generations ago through an aesthetics-based criticism. Tracing art history from a mimetic tradition through the modern era of manifestos, Danto shows that it wasn't until the invention of Pop art that the historical understanding of the means and ends of art was nullified. Even modernist art, which tried to break with the past by questioning the ways of producing art, hinged on a narrative.Traditional notions of aesthetics can no longer apply to contemporary art, argues Danto. Instead he focuses on a philosophy of art criticism that can deal with perhaps the most perplexing feature of contemporary art: that everything is possible. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Artforum, Andy Warhol, and the Art of Living:What Art Educators Can Learn from the Recent History of American Art WritingDavid Carrier (bio)When around 1980 I began writing art criticism, Artforum was much concerned with historical analysis.1 When presenting the work of younger painters and sculptors, it seemed natural to explain artists' accomplishments by identifying precedents for their work. Much of my criticism published in the 1980s presented post-formalist (...) accounts of abstract painting. Seeking precedents for the painting I admired, I looked to the history of art. But such pleas for the value of tradition were doomed. Commentators preaching the values of tradition lost out to the writers emphasizing a break with the past. Much of interest for art education can be learned by studying the history of this very influential, small circulation journal.Only in retrospect did the urgency of this felt need for a break with the past become apparent. The history of responses to Abstract Expressionism suggested a different way of thinking about moments of change. HaroldRosenberg's conception of "action painting" implied that Pollock broke dramatically with the past. Clement Greenberg, by contrast, in a famous phrase said: "I do not think it exaggerated to say that Pollock's 1946-1950 manner really took up Analytic Cubism from the point at which Picasso and Braquehad left it...in their collages of 1912 and 1913."2 Greenberg's counter-intuitive analysis, asking us to see very different looking paintings as essentially similar, had prevailed. So it was not unreasonable to expect that after Greenberg, concern with tradition would remain important. But that was not what happened.Demand for a break with the past often carries political overtones. Historians debate whether the French Revolution broke with the past, or merely developed trends of the old regime. The idea of a complete break with tradition can seem attractive, but of course such dramatic ways of thinking underestimate real continuities. Struggle among post-Greenbergian artwriters to define a new critical paradigm mimics conflicts among artists to define the [End Page 1] leading post-Abstract Expressionist tradition. Once a critical paradigm has been established, debate may proceed peacefully. But when defining a period style is at issue, the stakes are high, and so conflicts are ferocious. Of course, struggle is always accompanied also by co-operation, but failing to grasp the real role of conflict leads to all-too-pious visions of what is possible.Greenberg developedthe most influential critical approach, and so when his way of thinking was rejected, a radically different approach was of most interest. Here we are dealing with what Harold Bloom famously called the anxiety of influence. Just as the most interesting painting after Abstract Expressionism deconstructed that tradition, so in criticism no ways of thinking too similar to Greenberg's stood a chance of being important. I think it interesting to reconstruct the process rationally in which an individual obtains such power. A totem, Freud explains, is "an animal (whether edible and harmless or dangerous and feared) and more rarely a plant or a natural phenomenon (such as rain or water), which stands in a peculiar relation to the whole clan."3 The communion bread and wine are just bread and wine, but for the believer they become Christ's body and blood. Rationally speaking, a representational painting is just pigment on canvas; and a minimalist sculpture, just shaped metal. But in what Arthur Danto calls the "transfiguration of the commonplace," "a work of art...has qualities to attend to which its untransfigured counterpart lacks...We are dealing with an altogether different order of things."4 Greenberg became a totem. He was not just an important writer whose arguments entitled him to reasonable respect. The mere mention of his name invoked irrational fears.Greenberg was obsessed with tradition. Abstract Expressionism was rooted in early modernism, so that the era from Manet through Pollock defined a period style. Greenberg's historiography may seem inescapable. How can a young painter be understood except by seeking precedents for her achievement? Cannot the now famous artists who emerged in the 1980s be understood in these terms? Barbara Kruger comes out of John Heartfield and dada... (shrink)

Noise is a common experience in the contemporary world. Din from traffic, construction sites, factories, and neighbors bother urban residents. Radio listeners, television watchers, and mobile phone users have to endure statics and fading from time to time. Music lovers have debated whether jazz, atonal composition, rock and roll, rap, and abstract expressionism are art or nuisance. Scientists try to retrieve genuine signals from fluctuating data. Engineers design devices, software, or systems to filter out disturbance to the normal (...) functioning of technology. Mathematicians and physicists examine randomness. Traders and economists attempt to predict markets’ future trends beneath highly irregular commodity prices.. (shrink)

The degree of justification for a judgment of artistic value is normally directly proportional to the size of the comparison class that is brought to bear in making that judgment. If that comparison class is very small or nonexistent, justified judgments are unlikely or impossible. So which artworks, if any, are comparable? The claim that evaluative comparisons can be made among artworks within a fine-grained category—abstract expressionist paintings, for example—is relatively uncontroversial. But is there any way that we can (...) compare artworks that have only a very coarse-grained category in common (such as two works of visual art), or that are in completely different coarse-grained categories (such as a symphony and a sculpture)? I argue that both very similar and very different artworks can be compared evaluatively. Comparisons within fine-grained categories are common, and reflection on critical practices shows us that they depend crucially on qualitative assessments of artistically valuable properties. Once qualitative assessment is recognized as underwriting artistic criticism, it follows that even rough-grained categorization provides no essential barrier to comparison, securing the possibility of well-justified evaluations of disparate artworks. (shrink)

I argue that a fruitful approach to exploring the significance of the abstract expressionist Barnett Newman’s body of work, understood as as an attempt to “paint the sublime,” is by appeal to Peircian phenomenology and the conception of “originativity” that it entails. By attending, in particular, to Peirce’s conception of “the firstness of thirdness,” I show how this “reasonable feeling” both signifies our “affinity” with the world with which we transact and, with specific respect to what happens when looking (...) at Newman’s paintings, explains why we are spurred to reflect upon the meaning of these experiences. In this way, “the firstness of thirdness” accounts for our recognition of a form of reasonableness that exceeds that exhibited in ordinary conceptualization. (shrink)

Since the Romantic period, painters have no longer made use of traditional Christian iconography to express religious transcendence. Taking their cue from Schleiermacher's Reden Über die Religion, painters have sought for new, personal ways to express religious transcendence. One example is Caspar David Friedrich's Monk by the Sea. Rosenblum argues, in his Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition, that there is a parallel between Friedrich and the abstract expressionist Rothko with respect to the expression to religious transcendence. In (...) this article I investigate how the experience of transcendence that Rothko's paintings want to evoke is to be described. Is it an experience of the sublime in the Romantic tradition? Is it the evocation of the ultimate in accordance with Tillich's broad concept of religion? Does it display affinity between Rothko and the first generation of abstract painters such as Kandinsky and Malevich? Or is it a transcendent experience that cannot be situated so easily within the options supplied? After determining Rothko's understanding of transcendence, some issues will be brought up that could be fruitful for Christian theology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United StatesJane DuranAngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States, by Janet Wolff. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003, 172 pp.AngloModern, Janet Wolff's scintillating attempt to limn the construction of modernity in the visual arts, is more than worth reading for a number of reasons. In this work, she details how modernity positioned itself against a number of (...) strands of development, and then, by a process of exclusion, formulated its own stance. As poststructuralist theory has taught us, the procedures of building an excluded body against a center, when closely examined, frequently tell us more about a rubric or label than we could otherwise have imagined.Wolff is primarily concerned with three areas of exclusion/construction for the turn in the visual arts, painting in particular, that began at the opening of the twentieth century. Toward the beginning of the work, she notes that there was always a continuous realist and figurative genre at work even in modernist circles, but it seldom achieved anything like the recognition that the more typically abstract works we associate with the rise of modernism gained. She associates this area of nonrecognition with the work of women in particular, and these two areas alone — the realist/figurative and any work done by a woman artist — constitute two of her most important foci in AngloModern. In addition, and with some difficulty, since it adds a layer of complication, she is concerned about the exclusion and marginalization of Jewish artists during thisperiod — both in galleries and in thecommentary generated by the art world — although it is clear that many of the major "abstract" works associated with modernism were, in fact, produced by Jewish artists.Wolff is at her best in laying out in precise detail how it is that the culture of the art world throws up nearly insurmountable barriers against those deemed unworthy at a fairly early point in the construction of any new movement. The single strongest chapter in the work may well be the second, "Questions of Discovery: the Art of Kathleen McEnery," in which Wolff shows how various processes of categorization kept the work of this extremely talented woman from receiving anything like the recognition it deserved for a long period of time. Wolff sums up her overall project, and how it will relate to an artist such as McEnery, in her Introduction, when she writes:The story of modern art that is challenged [in her book] is the narrative tracing the development of Western painting from France to the United States, in a lineage more or less running from Manet and Post-Impressionism, by way of Cubism and Surrealism, to Abstract Expressionism. It is a story produced and reinforced by critics, academics, curators, and museum directors.(p. 3)Women artists, for example, were frequently excluded not only becausethey were women, but because they may have tended to engage in painting that was more realist, which itself [End Page 118] became coded as "feminine," and so forth. McEnery's intriguing portraits of the early two decades of the twentieth century were "discovered," as Wolff notes for the l987 inaugural exhibition of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, despite the fact that McEnery had at one point been fairly well-known (pp. 41-42). A woman at work in a figurative tradition, and working in suburban circles far away from the geographical centers of the art world, she was quickly at the mercy of the canonical forces of art historical construction.As we attempt to educate our students about rubrics, social movements, and the relationship of the arts to the political events of an era, we can do little better than to cite, for illustrative purposes, a number of interesting cases, and Wolff does just that. In sharp and incisive prose, she not only investigates McEnery's disappearance from the approved version of the early American modernist scene, but she also examines the construction of the early group displayed at the Whitney, the notion of the "feminine" in the work of Simmel and Benjamin, and, finally, the notion of the "Jewish artist." As her exemplar for the... (shrink)

:Visual culture – art, film, entertainment, advertising – are saturated with images of normative heterosexual masculinity. They form visual narratives that project a largely coherent kind of masculinity where heterosexual men are shown to be creative and powerful; they initiate heroic action, take the moral high ground and preserve traditional roles and the status quo. This widely extensive visual field, peopled with normative images of masculinity, also affects and infiltrates the domain of art exemplified by Jackson Pollock and abstract (...) expressionism which, to the present day, continues to project masculinity as the originator and pioneer of aesthetic value. This essay reviews feminist and queer artists’ image making that appropriates the myth of homogeneous masculinity and turns it into a medium for a variety of creative and hybrid explorations. I argue that Deleuzoguattarian concepts such as becoming-woman and becoming-imperceptible help us to understand this molecularisation of masculinity. And importantly in the other direction, these feminist and queer image makers allow us to understand and explore more fully these concepts. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to analyze the relationship between the thought of Jean François Lyotard and the american abstract expressionism. Firstly, we will study the ideas of Lyotard about Kantian aesthetics. Secondly, we will focus on the theme of the sublime. Finally, we will tackle the study of the concept of time that determines the connection between Lyotard and abstract expressionism.

The purpose of this paper is to consider Dewey’s influence on American artistic culture between the nineteen-twenties and the nineteen-fifties by focusing on the social and political implications of his approach to art in terms of experience. This entails recapturing, in a concise form, the impact of Dewey’s thought on the development of the Federal Art Project and on Abstract Expressionism. On the basis of the pragmatist assumption that the soundness of a theoretical proposal is to be measured (...) according to its capacity to meet the difficulties arising in our everyday interactions, the present paper systematically examines the theoretical implications of Dewey’s aesthetics in the light of the historical consequences of a specific cultural policy. Dewey’s conception of art and aesthetic experience appears to have made a decisive contribution by providing new opportunities to enjoy the arts and by widely promoting practices with the potential to be aesthetically satisfying. Dewey’s ideas actually led to an undermining of the hierarchy between the fine arts and crafts, between popular culture and design, etc. More problematic are their connections with questions of cultural identity and of art market. Dewey’s influence on the Abstract Expressionists is evident in the way it shifted the artistic focus from art objects toward the experiential dimensions of artistic practices. Some problems regard the accessibility of this kind of works for a general audience and a certain reinforcement of the conception of the artist as creative genius, included the related interpretation of artistic creation as extreme subjective expression. (shrink)

This interview was conducted with one of the closest friends of the visual artist Ray Johnson, the late photographer and writer William S. Wilson. Johnson was a fixture of the New York downtown art scene in the late 1940, 1950s, and 1960s. He was influenced by Abstract Expressionists and Pop artists alike, but was a true original, widely considered to be the founder of “mail art” and also an important collagist and performance artist. Wilson helped Johnson to formulate the (...) idea of “mail art” as they exchanged correspondence, thoughts, ideas, experiences, and much else besides. In this interview, Wilson discusses Johnson's sexuality, sadomasochistic practice, and philosophy of friendship. He provides hitherto unknown details about Johnson's intimate relations with the artist Richard Lippold and life at Black Mountain College. Wilson also recounts details of Johnson's relation to women in terms of art, friendship, love, and sex. But more than anything, this interview captures the atmosphere of queer life in the middle decades of the twentieth century and Johnson's particular experiences of that era. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Painting Outside the Lines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern ArtMatthew ZiffPainting Outside the Lines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art, by David W. Galenson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001, 272 pp., $29.95.The relationship between the market value of paintings and the chronological point in an artist's working life when the paintings were produced is the driving mechanism for exploring creativity and innovation in David W. Galenson's book (...) "Painting Outside the Lines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art. The working thesis of this book is that Modern artists have worked creatively and innovatively in one of two distinctly different manners. The terminology Galenson uses to describe these distinct ways of working are "finders" and "seekers." Finders are artists like Pablo Picasso, who at age 26, make startling and important innovations with little advance indication that such a burst is about to take place. Seekers are artists like Paul Cezanne, whospend their entire working lives engaged in the pursuit of a singular approach or achievement. The differences between these methodologies are carefully presented through the details of the working lives of a variety of Modern artists. French nineteenth century and early twentieth-century artists and mid-twentieth-century American artists are used as the source data for these comparisons.Early in the book Galenson presents lists of chronological events within the lives of artists and market valuation of their work within this chronology. The dramatic clarity of the relationships presented in this data sets the stage for the detailed information that follows. Factors that in some cases only partly, and in others nearly completely, explain an artist's way of working are offered through biographic information, information about the aesthetic and cultural milieu, and about the economic and educational structures that are predominant during the relevant time in the life of the artist.The relationship between the aesthetic and cultural milieu surrounding an artist and the capacity or inclination of an artist to be innovative is an important aspect of the book's analysis. The scope of the book is limited to Modern artists because of the shift that took place at the outset of Modern art, during the mid 1860s, that brought a strong emphasis on innovation and change for their own sake as an important characteristic within a work of art. This emphasis "created incentives for painters to produce new approaches to art" (p. 111). Prior to the time of Modern art, innovation and change were often unnecessary for an artist to be successful. Modern art introduced the demand that innovation and change be necessary ingredients in art, and therefore the search for innovation became a significant element within the work of many artists. The manner in which this search took place, as presented through the data at hand, reveals how individual artists viewed the need for innovation and change within their own [End Page 123] work. Paul Cezanne, for example, was aware of the impact that his painting was having on the art world, but he insisted that he was not yet finished with discoveries that would reveal the truest expression of his beliefs about aesthetic expression.In the American movement, "Abstract Expressionism," Galenson finds a useful counter example to the art scene in Paris. In the United States, especially during the 1940s and 1950s — the peak years of creative output by Abstract Expressionist artists — the demand for their work was quite low. There were few economically viable outlets for the work of de Kooning, Pollack, Rothko, and the others of this group. Consequently there is a shift in the chronological point at which these artists achieve market value success. Nearly all of these artists receivedrecognition at an older age than the French artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.The thesis of the book, that there are two fundamentally different ways of working to produce works of art, is directly applicable to, and useful in, exploring issues of teaching and learning in design education. As a teacher of interior architecture I was interested to follow the details that Galenson presented in support of his analysis of the careers of numerous Modern artists. The methodological differences between seeking and... (shrink)

Theology, vulnerability, and art as the consciousness of grief -- Christology positive and im-positive -- Dedication to vulnerability in the form of art -- Visual art as a resource for theology of the incarnation -- Beyond language, beyond reason: vulnerability, art, and the problem of catastrophic suffering -- The presence of the absent God: incarnation and abstract expressionism.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Seven Poems NICOLAS CALAS (Translated by Avi Sharon) hellenizing surrealism: a greek door to europe Nicolas calas (Kalamares) may be considered merely a minor Greek poet, but he had a major global persona and influence. In the middle of the last century he played a catalyzing role in the international avant garde: He was a Zelig-like polemicist in three languages (Greek, French, and English) and across three (...) cultural capitals (Athens, Paris, and New York). But he always fought on a singular front: surrealism. Born in Lausanne in 1907, he grew up in Athens and by the later 1920s began to stand out in literary circles (he was over 6' 4") for his modernist if not revolutionary views. Starting from an interest in Freud and Marx, the subconscious and the revolutionary, Calas soon arrived at their natural synthesis—surrealism. Around the time when a distinctly Greek form of surrealist poetry emerged, with the 1935 publication of “Blast Furnace” by Andreas Embiricos, Calas was on his way to becoming its unofficial spokesman. He moved to the epicenter of the movement in Paris and with the 1938 publication of Foyers d’Incendie became the “most lucid and audacious” of founder André Breton’s acolytes, both prophet and demagogue of the group. Carried along in the current of European artists and thinkers leaving Europe for New York, he would continue the fight on the western wing of the faction (literally, coming to blows at a cocktail party with Clement Greenberg, representing the opposing Abstract Expressionist side). In 1942 he published another clarion pamphlet, Confound the Wise, giving the movement voice in English and befriending its most visible local supporters and practitioners, from Peggy Guggenheim to Marcel Duchamp. arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 The Wyndham Lewis of the operation, Calas was a cross-border catalyst, evangelizing the role of surrealism as a liberating and generative force in modern literature and art. For him and other writers and poets, the weapon that would most effectively derange the reader’s habitual conformism into revelatory and revolutionary perception was the surrealist image, poetry’s lingua franca. For Greek practitioners it was completely natural for that magical representation to arise out of their god-infested, sun-filled landscape. Here they had a force that was both blinding and enlightening, penetrating and transformative, local and universal. For Calas, the primary echo or reflection of that essential image was the island of Santorini, referenced in several of the translations here (and reminiscent of his fellow national Nikos Gatsos’s use of the island of Amorgos in a similar context). It stood as the very symbol of fiery transformation, an image monstrous enough to shock the reader into a super-rational embrace of its own form of logic. This Hellenization of surrealism, like the Hellenization of modernism itself, was to become an important, transformative power in its own right. For many, the origin (and likewise, for many, the enclosing border ) of surrealism was France. “But it is French. It is their invention,” was how William Carlos Williams saw it, to his chagrin. Williams was convinced that the objective concentration on the image itself (“no ideas but in things”) could offer a salutary corrective to American poetry of his time. “It is the surrealists who have invented the living defense of literature,” he wrote in a 1929 essay. But for a poet so at one with the American Grain to be reconciled with surrealism’s ‘Francite’ he needed some way to cross the divide. His admiration for Calas’s work in clarifying and promoting the group’s ideas enabled the Greek poet to serve as a mediator, to allow the creative transference of its rebellious wisdom into Williams’s poetry. To borrow the title of one of his early American essays, Calas provided Williams a “Greek door to Europe.” In translating four of Calas’s French poems into English, published in 1941 with a frontispiece by the surrealist painter and magician Kurt Seligman, Williams leveraged Calas as the vehicle through which the “enabling foreignness” of surrealism could be grafted into the grain of his American modernist work, just as he set out on his magnum opus, Paterson. In a similar way... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Why Was There So Much Ugly Art in the Twentieth Century?David E.W. Fenner (bio)Two of the most common challenges that teachers of aesthetics have to face in their classrooms today are, first, the presumption that since "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and "there's no disputing taste," every aesthetic judgment is as good as every other one. The second is that the content from which aesthetics (...) courses commonly draw for examples and for the impetus for contemporary philosophy of art theory — and by this I mean art from Post-Impressionism to the present — is made up of "stuff I could have done when I was four years old." The substance behind these two challenges — that aesthetic judgment is highly or perhaps exclusively subjective and that twentieth-century art does not demonstrate care of technique, or that it is simply ugly1 — are intimately connected. This connection is the focus of this essay. The answer to the question, "why was there so much ugly art in the twentieth century?" may be that the tradition of showing beauty to be a highly or purely subjective phenomenon renders beauty apparently less valuable than if it were objective in character, and so we have, in the twentieth century, a move away from the production in art of beauty to that which is simply "artistic" or "artistically important." I want to come at this thesis not through a discussion about either the location or the reality of aesthetic properties. Instead, I want to focus on the "ugly art."Students in aesthetics courses tend to take one of three positions regarding modern art, and by "modern art," I mean art from Post-Impressionism to the present, including Pop Art, Dada, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and the rest: 1. They deny the value of it, together with claims about their artistic abilities during their kindergarten years. 2. Because they know something of the history and progression of twentieth-century art, or because they have an experiential basis for approaching modern art conceptually, they actually appreciate and value it. 3. They think they ought to value it (the way so many of us feel when buying our very first tickets to the [End Page 13] opera), and they do their level best to act in accord with what they see as their aesthetic obligation. Those of the first camp will probably voice their positions early in aesthetics courses, and at that point the challenge for the teacher is raised.Teachers in aesthetics courses, when faced with this challenge, tend, I think, to take one of three positions in response: 1. They use the authority of their office to stifle the discussion, hoping that students of the first camp will over the course of time and exposure at least move to being students of the third camp. 2. They embrace the complaint, discuss it, give it due regard (after all, those teachers probably read Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word themselves), but leave the final decision about the merit of modern art open and unsettled. I presume this is the majority position, at least in philosophical courses of aesthetics. 3. They seek to impart to students — through exposure, discussion, and the eloquence they can muster of descriptions of their own positive, valuable experiences with modern art — some sense of its merit. In this essay, I will sketch out yet another way to deal with the challenge, one that focuses on the history of aesthetics itself.The HistoryThe history of aesthetic judgment — that is, with the correctness of particular aesthetic judgments — begins with Aristotle.2 He said that an object is aesthetically good — or, actually, beautiful — if it is ordered, symmetrical, and definite, and if it demonstrates each of these virtues to a high degree.3 This analysis we call "formal," because it focuses on the presence in the object of certain aesthetic properties, ones that have to do with the form (as distinguished from the content) of the object. The more basic the cited aesthetic properties, the better, because the strength of the power of one's judgment, along with the power of evidence that can be cited in support of that judgment... (shrink)

Looking back in the late fifties on the rise of New York's postwar avant-garde, Clement Greenberg remarked that “some day it will have to be told how ‘anti-Stalinism,’ which started out more or less as ‘Trotskyism,’ turned into art for art's sake, and thereby cleared the way, heroically, for what was to come.” It was a good point, and one that Greenberg himself had largely neglected in his own accounts of American Modernism. The story of how New York Intellectuals and (...) Abstract Expressionists came to the defense of artistic vanguardism from a common past of Marxist commitments, and of how that defense ended in the fifties with a celebration of American cultural freedom, certainly had to be told. (shrink)

I offer an interpretation of the puzzle posed by Greenberg’s failure to come to terms with the explosion of postmodernist experimentation in the 1960’s. Greenberg, one of the most influential critics of the immediately preceding period and a strong supporter of New York abstract expressionism and color field painting, is indelibly associated with modernist schools of painting. His short essay, “Modernist Painting”, valorized precisely these movements and was a tour de force catapulting Greenberg into critic superstar status; it (...) is still one of the central documents in debates about modernism. Because Greenberg there makes references to Kant’s aesthetics in identifying the virtues of modernism his account is usually interpreted in terms of the formalism of the period and Kant’s analytic of the beautiful. This offers a reading of Greenberg as a formalist and as identifying modernism with a concern for the formal properties of art, the flatness of the picture frame and the formal relations between the aesthetic properties. Greenberg was also celebrated as having a legendary acuteness of aesthetic appreciation—a critical eye penetrating immediately to a work’s aesthetic depth. (shrink)

Often labelled as "indescribable," the sublime is a term that has been debated for centuries amongst writers, artists, philosophers and theorists. Usually related to ideas of the great, the awe-inspiring and the overpowering, the sublime has become a complex yet crucial concept in many disciplines. Offering historical overviews and explanations, Philip Shaw looks at: · The legacy of the earliest, classical theories of the sublime through the romantic to the post-modern and avant-garde sublimity · The major theorists of the sublime (...) such as Kant, Burke, Lyotard, Derrida, Lacan and Zizek, offering critical introductions to each · The significance of the concept through a range of literary readings including the Old and New testaments, Homer, Milton and writing from the romantic era · How the concept of the sublime has affected other art forms such as painting and film, from abstract expressionism to David Lynch's neo-noir This remarkably clear study of what is, in essence, a term which evades definition, is essential reading for students of literature, critical and cultural theory. (shrink)

The contemporary vision of modernism, which is constructed from a point outside of that period, differs from the vision created by the participants and originators of modernism. One of the major problems encountered today is the one of the meaning of modernist works art. The extreme concept of "silent" and "pure" art followed by Clement Greenberg and other modernists has now found itself under criticism. The interpretations of many modern currents in art reveal attempts at identifying new content in works (...) of art, which sometimes seems to be an act of assigning new meaning to art. Such interpretations can be observed in studies of impressionism, cubism, abstract expressionism and minimalism. The problem of meaning is the subject of study of such theorists as Timothy J. Clark, Patricia Leighten, Serge Guilbaut, Rosalind Krauss and W. J. T. Mitchell. Their research concentrates not as much on works of art as on modernists' vision of art. Mitchell shows how theory replaced the content of modernism art and proves that "silent" art is impossible since meanings arise independently of the artist's intention in the process reception. The new vision of modernism does not attempt to create a universal and objective model of that period but instead aims at a multiplication of meanings and at a destruction of the previous model (the holistic model). The vision of modernism comes to resemble a mosaic of unconnected elements. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Chaos, Fractals, and the Pedagogical Challenge of Jackson Pollock's "All-Over" PaintingsFrancis Halsall (bio)IntroductionThe "all-over" abstract canvases that Jackson Pollock produced between 1943 and 1951 present a pedagogical challenge in how to account for their apparently chaotic structure. One reason that they are difficult to teach about is that they have proved notoriously difficult for art historians to come to terms with. This is undoubtedly a consequence of (...) their abstraction. In the face of an apparent disintegration of the traditional pictorial distinction between figure and ground, multiplicities of (sometimes contradictory) readings present themselves. The question, posed to students, as to what they represent is an open one. To many, recalling the opinions of the baffled audience of the 1950s, they are nothing but an inchoate mess. In 1950 Time magazine referred to them as "chaos," prompting Pollock to wire a heated reply, "NO CHAOS DAMN IT."1Pollock's claim of "no chaos" can, however, be unpacked. This article looks at how a scientific analysis based on Chaos Theory and fractal patterns can be used to demonstrate to students that the paintings are indeed chaotic, but that this in turn provides evidence of an internal structure, an order within the chaos. This order is mimetically similar to other chaotic patterns and systems, from coastlines to economic systems. My overall position in this article is one of skepticism as to what such analysis ultimately has to offer in art historical, aesthetic, or pedagogical terms.The ProblemFor a student encountering Pollock's work for the first time, especially after a standard first-year survey of Western art, it can seem incomprehensible. [End Page 1] The challenge of Pollock's work is that none of the multiple interpretations that have been brought to bear on the paintings have any special claim to validity. Given the suggestive ambiguity and "chaos" of the images, there is little in the work itself that challenges the numerous, often contradictory, readings that have been posited. In fact, how art historians approach such images tells students something about the way art history itself works and how art historians are faced with particular choices in applying their discursive models. They must choose whether these accounts "fit" or satisfy the conditions of "rightness," to evoke Nelson Goodman's terms.2The numerous questions that have been asked of what the paintings actually represent are themselves demonstrative of the wide variety of techniques that modern art historians have at their disposal. Analyses have been based upon observations that are couched in the vocabularies of the political (often Marxist theory), feminism, psychoanalysis, iconography, formalism, and so forth.3 At the time of the paintings' creation even the CIA was in on the act; apparently realizing the ambiguity of the work left it open to political manipulation, they secretly funded the promotion of abstract expressionism as a weapon of the cold war.4 Simultaneously, members of Congress such as George Dondero were actually claiming the opposite—that Pollock was making paintings that were a "means of espionage" (sic) and that "If you know how to read them... [they] will disclose weak spots in U.S. fortifications, and such crucial constructions as Boulder Dam."5Ernst Gombrich's celebrated frustration with abstract art highlights the problems that those following traditional art historical methods had with such art at the time. Writing on Pollock's Number 12 (1952), Gombrich also seemed perplexed in the face of chaos. His response to the lack of explicit representational content or apparently accountable meaning was to claim:It is quite consistent that these [action] painters must counteract all semblance of familiar objects or even of patterns in space. But few of them appear to realise that they can drive into the desired identification only those who know how to apply the various traditional consistency tests and thereby discover the absence of any meaning except the highly ambiguous meaning of traces.6Indeed, if there is any consensus to be communicated to students about the work, it is that a single, specific meaning will always allude them.All of the above reactions to the work makes the claims of three physicists to have found the... (shrink)