The romantic concept of genius is the foundation stone of the modern and postmodern concept of the “fineness” of fine art. Without it the ability of the fine art institution to create its canon of “great artists” and the capacity of the art market to sell faeces and urinals as precious objects would collapse. But at the same time this concept is insidious because it focuses on the least significant aspect of art: its supposed “fineness”. In order to understand the concept of genius, which has insinuated itself into the popular unconscious, we need to take a look at the phenomenon of romanticism which arose in late 18th-century Europe and had a very significant impact upon art of the 19th century, which in turn laid the foundation for 20th century modern and postmodern art.
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I would like to draw your attention to a new website for the Kikit Visuosonic project http://www.visuosonic.org/ I was involved with KikitVisuosonic in its early stages and hence have some particular insight into its mission. Two artists are involved: Maurice Owen an Russell Richards. As with most significant art the founding idea was quite simple, to create an interaction between sound and interactive digital visualisation. From the beginning, however, this simple notion contained within itself the longstanding goal of attaining a Gesamtkunstwerk—a total work of art. (more…)
The term ”quiddity” as used in art theoretical writing refers an aesthetic that places emphasis upon the objecthood, or objectness of the work of art rather than its representational or metaphorical aspect. Such emphasis is principally associated with American minimal art which was presaged by Robert Rauschenberg’s White Painting 1951 (artintelligence) and began in earnest with Frank Stella’s black paintings in the late 1950s. Stella’s black paintings were self-referential, they were paintings about painting. In this sense they paralleled the work of Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns who foregrounded the materiality of painting. There is also a family resemblance between the semiotic blankness of John’s American flag paintings and Stella’s use of black stripes.
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This text is an extension of the post entitled “The Beginning of the End of Painting“, attempting to go deeper into the historical roots of the decline of painting. The notion of the “end” of painting possesses almost mythic significance due to the fact that for centuries painting was the principal defining feature of fine art. It was during the 1960s that painting lost its centuries-old lead, falling into the background, surpassed by new forms of art that could not even be defined firmly as sculpture, although they sometimes possessed a family resemblance to that medium. (more…)
In my last post I mentioned that I was disappointed to find that the venerable American art critic Donald Kuspit had beat me to the post with the title of his book “The End of Art”. Even before I read Kuspit’s book, however, I knew that it was antithetical to the position that I would take. Kuspit is a follower of a conservative apotheosis of modernist abstraction theorised and championed by the influential American art critic Clement Greenberg. In this post I will engage in a critical enquiry into aspects of Kuspit’s position.
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Born in Germany 1968 Wolfgang Tillmans moved to London in the 1980s and began his career photographing “street culture, Gay Pride and the rise of the clubbing generation” (Reynolds) for lifestyle magazines The Face and i-D. He came into prominence as a fine artist in 2000 when he won the prestigious Turner prize, and the Hamburger Bahnhof survey exhibition includes a reconstruction of his Turner prize installation. (more…)
Tatiana Trouvé’s sculptural installation (click image left) Black Polder [1] at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 was memorable. Like a great deal of contemporary sculpture it plays with narrative in a non-narrative, quasi-abstractionist, mode. In this case the visual game was complex and rewarding. There is something especially fascinating about scale in the context of sculptural imagination. A practising artist constantly sees objects in her everyday life that she can transpose into sculpture.
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It appears that the two principal forces keeping sculpture alive today are: firstly, the art market which always needs new objects to sell; and, secondly, the art education system which is largely unable to provide students with skills in the newer media that are more able to critically communicate in the culture in which we live. It was the sculptor Carl Andre who said why produce new objects when there are already too many, but if you can turn them into gold, and it doesn’t really matter what they look like, then why complain? (more…)
One of the more interesting works on view in the Neue Nationalgalerie was Mine, Ours, Everywhere II, 2008, by Isabel Lima. This consisted of a small square canvas (click image left) that carried various dirt marks on its surface which tied in extremely well with Thea Djordjadze’s enormous dirty window, which was one of the highpoints of the Neue Nationalgalerie aspect of the Berlin Biennial. One of the rather odd things about Mine, Ours, Everywhere II was that it was accompanied by a label. This was strange because none of the other works in the exhibition had labels. (more…)
In previous posts on the Biennial I have focused on video, in this post I will treat the work of Czech artist Katerina Šedá which was the best sculptural material on exhibition in the Biennial’s principal venue, the KW Institute. In addition, Šedá also had an apparently related grunge sculptural installation in the Skulpturenpark, which was accompanied by a document (see end of post) which suggested that it might have some kind of “social” aspect, although this was expressed in a very vague manner. (more…)
Ania Molska’s two video projections W=F*s (work), 2008, and P=W:t (power), 2007-2008 were projected onto corner walls in the KW Institute so as to function as a single video installation. It was a very effective combination. (more…)
This sculpture by Donald Judd (1928-1994) is a rather nice object. One could see it in the home or garden, perhaps, (if it is aluminium). But there is one problem, which is its price: around several hundred thousand dollars, some larger pieces go up to a million or even several million. That probably doesn’t seem strange, after all it is fine art. But Judd didn’t actually make his work, it was fabricated in a factory.
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In a previous post I showed how painting began the process of its own elimination, or more exactly its transition from being one of the defining categories of artness, to becoming just one more colour on the artist’s palette. In this post I will outline the beginning of the end of sculpture as a defining category. The story begins with minimalism, or more precisely it begins with abstraction, which along with the Readymade was ultimately responsible for the subordination of painting as a defining category of what is or is not “art”. (more…)
The 1960s was the period in which deconstructive art came into ascendency and painting lost its grip as the principal medium of fine art. But we can trace the evolution of this development further back. Certain individuals pursued the deconstructive turn in the 1950s, notably Robert Rauschenberg and Yves Klein. And, as always, we can trace the genealogy back further into early twentieth century art; specifically, to Cubist collage, Kurt Schwitters’ trash paintings, Dada’s philosophy of “anti-art”, the Dada and Surrealist concepts of chance, automatism, and montage, as well as the Duchampian Readymade. But, perhaps, the first icon for the mythic “end of painting” was created in 1915 when Kasimir Malevich produced his Black Square painting. (more…)
Isa Genzken’s installation for the German pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale, 2007, was a tour de force in the genre of grunge chic. One had an intimation of this even at the doorway of the pavilion courtesy of a massive pile of German Vogue magazine offprints of an article on Genzken’s show. (more…)
Minimalism just won’t go away, in spite of the surge of grunge that accompanied art of the 1990s. The Swedish artist Jacob Dahlgren (b. 1970) shows just how minimalism can be revitalised by leveraging the power of ‘interactivity’ .
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Rudolf Stingel’s, Untitled, 2003 was a massive pseudo-minimalist attempt at an interactive installation installed at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. The installation consisted of covering the walls of a small ante-room and a vast main gallery with aluminium foil-coated insulating material punctuated by pseudo-minimalist wall reliefs created by Stingel out of Styrofoam sheets. But, ostensibly, the principal purpose of this work is not to demonstrate the artist’s genius but rather give the viewer a go. The question can be posed, however, as to what exactly the viewer was given a go at. (more…)
Michal Rovner’s, Against Order? Against Disorder?, 2003, filled the Israeli pavilion in the Venice Biennale of 2003 providing a highly effective, multi-faceted and thought provoking immersive installation.
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This is a lecture I gave to my students; as it touches on some basic problems regarding the role of language, narrative and metaphor in contemporary fine art I thought I would share it with you. You will need to click the image to the left twice to get it full size.
Since the 1960s the dominant discourse in fine art is what I will refer to as “deconstructive art”. I am using my own terminology here (Coulter-Smith 2006) mainly because the dominant discourse of which I am speaking doesn’t have an institutionally agreed upon name yet, in the manner of ‘abstraction’ or ‘expressionism’. (more…)
Daniel von Sturmer’s, The Object of Things, 2007, is a video-sculptural installation filling the Australian Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale, 2007. Obviously there have been quite a number of sculptural installations since the 1990s (Coulter-Smith 2006), but this one is particularly interesting not only because of its intersection of sculpture and video but also because of its intersection of narrative and abstraction. (more…)
Zoe Leonard was certainly one of the very few highlights of documents 12. We were given an enormous room filled ceiling to floor with a mass of small scale photographs arranged into minimalist grids. One could easily wax lyrical about these images, after all they are very good photographs; however, in the light of the fact that Documenta 12 is putatively about ideas rather than about visuality (Saltz), one might take a different tack. (more…)
THREE VIDEO VIEWS OF FAROCKI’S DOCUMENTA 12 INSTALLATION ON THIS PAGE
In Documenta Doldrums Part 2 I ended with the work of Imogen Stidworthy noting that in my opinion it was the best piece in the entire exhibition. Again, from a personal point of view I would place Harun Farocki’s computational video installation Deep Play, 2007, in second place. Deep Play provides the viewer with an unusual perspective on the ‘beautiful game’: football. The topic of the video is the 9 July 2006 World Cup Final between France and Italy at the Olympiastadion Berlin. Instead of focusing on the traditional aesthetic topic of beauty Farocki’s twelve-screen computational video examines the game through the eyes of expert and surveillance systems both human and computational, but mostly computational.
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Sarah Oppenheim takes an empirical approach to art production, by observing viewers’ activity in social spaces. She believes that analysing the behaviour of people in urban spaces can reveal how such spaces form behaviour and how behaviour can in turn impact on inhabited spaces. Oppenheim notes: ‘One of the premises I work on is that late capitalist urban space is abstracted [standardized, homogenized] and as such limits the multiplicity of human inputs. The approach I take is to record human behaviour under a variety of conditions, observing the physical response to a given space. This act of analysis of human behaviour makes such behaviour more abstracted.’ (Oppenheim 2005).
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In this post I will examine Michel Day’s media installation Transit at Timebased Arts in Hull. During his preparation for the show Day became interested by the movement of traffic over the bridge behind the gallery. The constant flow of vehicles over the bridge seemed to have no predictable structure, although each passage held in common the experience of the traveller being raised above the water, being suspended above the city for a moment or two. These transient journeys over the bridge, with unknown start or destination, formed the basis for the piece. (more…)
The romantic concept of genius is the foundation stone of the modern and postmodern concept of the “fineness” of fine art. Without it the ability of the fine art institution to create its canon of “great artists” and the capacity of the art market to sell faeces and urinals as precious objects would collapse. But at the same time this concept is insidious because it focuses on the least significant aspect of art: its supposed “fineness”. In order to understand the concept of genius, which has insinuated itself into the popular unconscious, we need to take a look at the phenomenon of romanticism which arose in late 18th-century Europe and had a very significant impact upon art of the 19th century, which in turn laid the foundation for 20th century modern and postmodern art.
