Modernist art essay

1 Question: Le processus de la purification de l'art et de la littérature ne peut avoir pour dénoument que la fin (la disparition? l'inutilité?) de l'art lui-même. Ê tes-vous d'accord?





From the middle of the 19th century on, there emerged a school of thought which sought to replicate in the arts the progress which had been observed in other areas of life. It was believed that art should be rid of anything that was not "proper" to it, and that good art was art that questioned what art itself was.
This self questioning was, in a way, provoked by the emergence of photography. Up until this point, artists were lauded mainly for their technique, rather than their composition. However, with the advent of photography, the exact reproduction of scenes were now possible, and so the focus in painting moved away from mimesis. Instead, artists began to concentrate on what a painting could provide that a photograph couldn't. To do this, one needed to discover what was unique to painting, what distinguished it from other artistic disciplines. By removing the elements that painting shared with other forms of art, it was hoped that painting could be "purified". This was an attempt to define painting as an autonomous discipline. Paintings became flatter and less three dimensional during this transitional period, so as to re-enforce the difference between painting and sculpture. In a similar vein, many painters abandoned the practise of under-painting. This gave their paintings a less polished appearance, so differentiating painting from photography. Over time, an increasing number of elements that were not considered to belong to painting, such as myth, meaning, content, and verisimilitude, fell by the wayside.
It should be noted that this was a process which occurred naturally. There was no explicit manifesto among the artists who practised this purification, rather, stripping out all the inessential components seemed the best way to make their paintings "stronger" and "more expressive". (C. Greenberg).
If you negate everything however, in the end you are only left with nothing. By the 1950s, this was what appeared to have happened to painting. In a sense, it vacuumed itself out of existence. Paintings were produced by artists such as Yves Klein that consisted of only one colour on a sheet of canvas, and it seemed that purification had reached the end of the line. It was a creative dead end. According to the philosophy of purification, paintings such as these were the pinnacle of artistic achievement. Nonetheless, a large swathe of the public were not of this opinion. The problem is, if, in art, you remove all links to other arenas of life, you lessen people’s ability to relate to your work. Although it may be debated whether or not an artist should be influenced by what the public wants, without some concession to public taste or understanding, art is made irrelevant. To get people to stop and actively engage with a work of art, they need to be able to trust that the artist has something a)decipherable b)worth deciphering. If, as an artist, you abuse that trust, people will just keep walking. Art would then be merely decorative, no more significant than a piece of wallpaper.
Another problem with purification is that it denies the value of works of art that do not adhere to its philosophy. It posits the idea that an artwork's degree of purity is the only standard by which to judge it. Any other criteria for judging a piece of art, such as beauty, provocativeness etc. are thus deemed extraneous. However, Greenberg disagrees with this by saying:
"Ever so many factors thought to be essential to the making and experiencing of art have been shown not to be so by the fact that Modernist art [art made according to the philosophy of purification] has been able to dispense with them and yet continue to provide the experience of art in all its essentials. That this "demonstration" has left most of our old value judgements intact makes it only the more conclusive....Modernism has not lowered thereby the standing of Leonardo, Raphael, Titian etc...what Modernism has made clear is that, though the past did appreciate masters like these justly, it often gave wrong or irrelevant reasons for doing so" ¹
When Greenberg says the past masters were appreciated for the wrong or irrelevant reasons, one can only presume that he means they weren't appreciated for their Modernist artistic purity, thereby disproving his own point.
But why should there be one single standard for judging art? Should there even be a standard at all? Can we not simply be content to let each individual like what he likes without examining his reasons?
However, it is not as straightforward as this. When you are confronted with a work of art, it is impossible not to have an opinion on it. Even if your reaction is one of indifference, that is still a critical assessment on your part. Whether or not you are aware of it, even though it might feel instinctive, on some subconscious level you must have a basis for any opinion you hold of an artwork. In other words, the fact that we will always have criteria for judging art is inevitable.
Experience shows us that people collectively consider some works of art as having greater artistic value than others. Whether it be societal factors influencing our taste, or something in human nature that finds certain things distasteful and others pleasing, our taste in art is not completely individual or arbitrary. It stands to reason that, for an artist, knowledge of the criteria that people generally judge a work of art by can only improve her work. In other words, an artist should know what good art is. To do this, she must first ask what art is.
Which brings us back to our original quandary. Although the end-result was somewhat problematic, the reasons for purification were sound enough. Perhaps then, the problem lied not in making art that questioned ideas of what art was, but in the way the adherents of purification went about it. Eliminating everything that is "not proper to art", is not the only way of discovering what constitutes art. Coeval with the purification movement was one which tested the very limits of what could be called art, and though not officially named such, this movement could be called that of "provocation". It included artists such as Marcel Duchamp, who famously took a urinal, and with no alteration save the addition of his signature, displayed it in a gallery. Like the purification movement, it too forced people into thinking about what art was. It differed from purification however, in that it did not seek to separate painting from other areas of art, or art from other areas of life, indeed everyday objects were often incorporated into the art.
However, the provocation movement also encountered problems creatively because most of its power rested on its ability to shock people into thought. But the more people became habituated to these shock tactics, the less their impact. Albeit for different reasons, the public responded to "provocative" art in the same way they responded to "purified" art - they became disengaged. This is directly responsible for the situation that we have today, where appreciation of modern, critically acclaimed art, is a preserve of the few.
The key problem is that the public need a yardstick by which they can assess a work of art. Otherwise, they are left confused and switched off. Nowadays, when everything is possible artistically ², there is consequently no right or wrong in art. People then resort to judging art using spurious criteria, for example the amount of time and labour an artwork took to produce. This is not a suitable criterion however, since a masterpiece could take a year, or be created in a day, without making any difference to its artistic value.
It is debateable whether the process of purification, with its continual questioning of art, is responsible for the crisis today. As an alternative to purification, the movement of provocation has an equally unappealing dénoument. Questioning art through art may have been a reasonable thing to do in theory, however in practise, it led to unforeseen consequences. Removing the constraints of content, depth etc paradoxically led to less creative freedom in art, and a sense that the movement of purification has run its course. Art, as a whole, has lost its sense of direction.² What's more, the absence of clear criteria in judging art makes people become disinterested. When all’s said and done, art should be made for the people. The future of art post-purification remains unclear, after all, who can predict what will happen when anything is possible?




Bibliography:
1. "Modernist Painting by Clement Greenberg" p101-110
2. "Chapter 1: Introduction: Modern, Postmodern and Contemporary” p 2-19. Danto, Arthur. After the End of Art. Publisher: New Jersey, Preston UP. Year of Publication 1997.
3. “Salon de 1859” by Charles Baudelaire.
4. “La Peintre de la vie Moderne” by Charles Baudelaire
5. “Intellectualism, Anarchism and Stasis” Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Calinescu, Matei. Publisher: Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Publication Year: 1987