Thursday, February 9, 2017
Wednesday, February 8, 2017
Not Done with Dunning--Roots of Postmodernism
Book 2. He still loves "aporia", but this book is significantly better edited. Some tidbits for thought:
"I find it a fascinating paradox that the more sensuous retinal aesthetic tends to be supported by advocates of logic and reason, while the more intellectual aesthetic of the signing painters tends to be supported by advocates of the irrational." vi
"For as our art has grown more linguistic, it has become more symbolic, mythic, and didactic, and these are the very qualities that stand out in the art of the Middle Ages and the Netherlands." ix
"The northern empirical nature led the Dutch to trust many different ways of knowing the world, and each of these ways involved picturing of one kind or another: the telescope, the microscope, the camera obscura, painted pictures, and maps. ..The postmodern emphasis on learning about the world by means of advanced microscopes and telescopes, as well as photographs in books, magazines, television, and movies, echoes this northern method of knowing through pictures." 19
On invention of the globe and the Mercator projection map: "Comparisons...forced map-makers to confront a fundamental dilemma about the language of representation: the unresolvable contradiction that is created when an attempt is made to represent the curved space of the earth on a flat chart." 23
"In fact, both the microscope and the map render visible things that are otherwise invisible, in the best spirit of the Middle Ages." 77
"When Newton could not find a language to fit his purpose, he invented a new one ... as his method grew more complex, it also became less stable." 80
"No major idea--with the possible exception of the zipper--has ever sprung full-blown from the head of a single person. Usually there is 'something in the air,' a unified awareness in the collective mind that permeates disciplines, including art. Ideas accumulate slowly until they saturate (or supersaturate) a society." 106
"It is the original idea as it exists in the mind of the artist that is the real work or art, and not the product of that idea, which merely represents real art." 143
"Postmodernists in general are fascinated by languages and their ability to simultaneously amplify and limit our understanding." 160
"'We are still living under the reign of logic'." --Breton 164
"When a painting is so accurate in its depiction of objects and the space in which they exist that the scene seems to actually exist in its own space on the other side of a window, that painting is said to be visually transparent. Modern artists destroyed this transparency: they created an opaque picture plane." 203
"The best painters have always had a high tolerance for chaos...Barnett Newman once wrote: 'The subject matter of creation is chaos'." 224
"The split second has been growing more and more important to us." --Steinbeck 262
"Any single text offers little more than a view through a kaleidoscope. Each view, if well presented, may seem complete and consistent, yet a slight twist of the cylinder generates still another image; and that image, too, may seem just as complete and just as consistent." 268
"Ideas, though not to be taken seriously, are not to be ignored." 270
"There is also an inverse relationship between painting's ability to communicate on a timeless universal level and its ability to communicate precise verbal ideas." 273
"One of the primary functions of a scientist or an artist is to explore and expand concepts of reality. The artists who have proved most valuable to their society have one so by posing new questions rather than by asserting answers." 275
"I find it a fascinating paradox that the more sensuous retinal aesthetic tends to be supported by advocates of logic and reason, while the more intellectual aesthetic of the signing painters tends to be supported by advocates of the irrational." vi
"For as our art has grown more linguistic, it has become more symbolic, mythic, and didactic, and these are the very qualities that stand out in the art of the Middle Ages and the Netherlands." ix
"The northern empirical nature led the Dutch to trust many different ways of knowing the world, and each of these ways involved picturing of one kind or another: the telescope, the microscope, the camera obscura, painted pictures, and maps. ..The postmodern emphasis on learning about the world by means of advanced microscopes and telescopes, as well as photographs in books, magazines, television, and movies, echoes this northern method of knowing through pictures." 19
On invention of the globe and the Mercator projection map: "Comparisons...forced map-makers to confront a fundamental dilemma about the language of representation: the unresolvable contradiction that is created when an attempt is made to represent the curved space of the earth on a flat chart." 23
"In fact, both the microscope and the map render visible things that are otherwise invisible, in the best spirit of the Middle Ages." 77
"When Newton could not find a language to fit his purpose, he invented a new one ... as his method grew more complex, it also became less stable." 80
"No major idea--with the possible exception of the zipper--has ever sprung full-blown from the head of a single person. Usually there is 'something in the air,' a unified awareness in the collective mind that permeates disciplines, including art. Ideas accumulate slowly until they saturate (or supersaturate) a society." 106
"It is the original idea as it exists in the mind of the artist that is the real work or art, and not the product of that idea, which merely represents real art." 143
"Postmodernists in general are fascinated by languages and their ability to simultaneously amplify and limit our understanding." 160
"'We are still living under the reign of logic'." --Breton 164
"When a painting is so accurate in its depiction of objects and the space in which they exist that the scene seems to actually exist in its own space on the other side of a window, that painting is said to be visually transparent. Modern artists destroyed this transparency: they created an opaque picture plane." 203
"The best painters have always had a high tolerance for chaos...Barnett Newman once wrote: 'The subject matter of creation is chaos'." 224
"The split second has been growing more and more important to us." --Steinbeck 262
"Any single text offers little more than a view through a kaleidoscope. Each view, if well presented, may seem complete and consistent, yet a slight twist of the cylinder generates still another image; and that image, too, may seem just as complete and just as consistent." 268
"Ideas, though not to be taken seriously, are not to be ignored." 270
"There is also an inverse relationship between painting's ability to communicate on a timeless universal level and its ability to communicate precise verbal ideas." 273
"One of the primary functions of a scientist or an artist is to explore and expand concepts of reality. The artists who have proved most valuable to their society have one so by posing new questions rather than by asserting answers." 275
Dunning Ideas--Modernism and its Precedents
Changing Images of Pictorial Space by William Dunning
First let me say that Dunning consistently loves two things--the word "aporia" and art by Dan Rice. Rice's work appears on the covers of both his books (the other to be discussed here in a second post). If there were a cover for every time Dunning used the word "aporia", this book would look like the Nixon administration. Also, Syracuse UP, you need to up your editing game on this volume. Typos are distracting, especially when Suzi Gablik's name is spelled two different ways in the same paragraph. But nonetheless, there are some ideas worth thinking about in here.
"The Renaissance system of perspective was created by restructuring the elements of Greco-Roman perspective, impressionism was created by restructuring the elements of Renaissance perspective, and modern art was created by restructuring the elements of impressionism. European perspective has thus been through at least two complete cycles of separating and recombining these elements in the quest for new images. In short, the various techniques involved in mimesis--creating an illusion--have furnished fertile ground for two millennia of creative strategy in painting." 9
"Medieval painters felt as if they existed in, and were a part of, their pictorial world, while during the Renaissance, painters of perspective stood outside the world they represented and observed--as if through a window--from a single, unifying viewpoint." 13
Middle Ages:
"abstraction, rigidity, and simplification were a symbol for the divine" 19
'"When we cannot take hold of or show the thing ... then we signify, we go through the detour of signs". The sign is a deferred presence.' From Derrida 25
"The degree of realism to which an object is said to be represented depends primarily on how expertly the painter captures or improves upon the image in terms of current conventions. When we say that a picture looks like nature, we mean that it matches the manner in which we have usually seen nature depicted." 33
"All newly invented visual elements of realism in painting may for a time conflict with the realism of elements already in use and thus strike contemporaries of the artist as strange, yet at the same time as markedly true." 34
"No single painting can depict a whole 'truth'. Each painting is only a supplementary view of any external 'truth'." 36
Proto-Renaissance
"With the invention of perspective, art seemed to have become science." 37
"Renaissance perspective was not a truth waiting to be discovered, but a convention, and invented style, instigated by society's priorities and assumptions, and therefore matching the beliefs and ideologies of the culture so well that its limitations and boundaries were all but invisible to the Renaissance viewer." 38
"Abolishing the dualistic borderlines between such concepts as the sacred and the profane gave secular art a sudden access to emotional vistas previously accessible only through religion. Thus, the creation of art could be equated with religious inspiration, and genius became linked with divine inspiration." 55
"These meanings are not easily apparent, and when we work to discover them we tend to accept them as 'fact' more easily than those obviously discursive elements like the halo that seems obviously propagandistic." "'Truth cannot reside in the obvious, the central, the stressed, but only in the hidden, the peripheral, the unemphasized.'" "Perspective...is persuasive, rather than true." 60
Baroque:
"Perhaps two centuries of seeing and accepting the world, and its space, represented in painting by means of the mathematical precision of the Renaissance system of perspective had some bearing on the seventeenth century's readiness to accept mathematics as an important key to reality." 90
On Caravaggio as developing area in front of, and beyond the "stage of the painting": "Painting before Caravaggio could move backward, it could step sideways, it could climb walls, but it could not march forward; it could not create its own destiny." --Stella 99
"Caravaggio used these ideas to create paintings with a new power, paintings that expressed a living Cartesian presence by their invasion of the viewer's own space." 100
Rococo:
"Emotional experiences were of interest in and of themselves rather than because of their tendency to create better citizens. The art work became 'more like an icon than a cudgel, and less likely than before to do anyone any harm. Or, one might add, any good'." 102
"What was important was the image of the painting, not the image in the painting. ...The figures in a painting were no longer important as single images, only as structure to fabricate a unifed spatial image." "Once again, important priorities had been reversed. Once space had been created to showcase man: man was the primary focus. Now man was used to create space: space assumed primacy." 107
Roots of Modernism:
"With the creation of non-Euclidean geometries, it became clear that mathematicians were not recording nature so much as interpreting it." 116
"Every method of depicting the world is based on the subjective selection of pertinent facts." 118
"Painting was no longer 'a window on the world, but a separate and autonomous entity, with its own particular, and strange, history.' " 123
"The Renaissance perception of man as the center of the universe stands in opposition to modern man's sense of being just another rather trivial element in the giant tapestry of an ever-expanding universe--a slight distortion, an insignificant point, in the fabric of infinity." 130
"In both the cathedral series and the haystack series, Monet not only implied a passage of time but indeed 'fragmented his object into a succession of moments of observation.' ...slices of time." 130
"Flatness was often understood to be compatible with the attributes of the common man: it was plain, workmanlike, and emphatic, and the loaded brushes were considered appropriate tools; thus, painting was considered to be honest manual labor." 142
"The unbroken unity of the surface was interpreted, especially by Cezanne, as a sign for the unrelenting consistency and evenness of sight itself." 143
"The atom bomb had made it impossible to express the anxieties and fears that formed the foundation of modern ideology in the same terms that had worked so well for the two previous generations 'without falling into the grotesque or the facile'" "Abstract expressionism became a metaphor for freedom; Schlesinger, however, had maintained that freedom was impossible without alienation and anxiety." 162
"Before the advent of modern art and its concern with space as the content of art, painters referred to their work as 'pictures'. ...But the modernists began to call their work 'paintings,' and what a thing is called begins to influence the thinking about it. Those who called their work paintings had a tendency to be less mimetic than others; they began to think of the painting as an object, complete unto itself." 169
"As the content of painting came to be thought of as less objectified or less phenomenologically real, the painting itself was forced to be considered more so" 172
"Illusion was now congruent with reality. This curtain--the marks on the opaque picture plane--was the cause of the illusion, and the illusion is the cause of the curtain; thus cause and effect are recursively inverted." 183
"Those ingredients that are noticeably absent may be said to be of as much importance as those that are present. Often a painter is, in effect, trapped by what offends him or her; one's direction may come to be defined by those ideas most rigorously avoided. 184
"The Renaissance emphasis on Euclidean geometry is the search for the known, the clear, the rational, the mathematical, and the provable. Non-Euclidean thought, however, traverses the region of the unknown, the assumed, the conjectural, the ambiguous, and the imaginary." 186
"The best art training institutions have always concentrated on turning out painters, not paintings." 194
"But formalists felt that the aesthetic was spiritual. They believed the aesthetic experience was related to, or the same as, a religious experience. This seems to be a principal difference between modern and postmodern painting. Modern art pursued the transcendental; postmodern art aspires to more intellectual and discursive interests." 212
First let me say that Dunning consistently loves two things--the word "aporia" and art by Dan Rice. Rice's work appears on the covers of both his books (the other to be discussed here in a second post). If there were a cover for every time Dunning used the word "aporia", this book would look like the Nixon administration. Also, Syracuse UP, you need to up your editing game on this volume. Typos are distracting, especially when Suzi Gablik's name is spelled two different ways in the same paragraph. But nonetheless, there are some ideas worth thinking about in here.
"The Renaissance system of perspective was created by restructuring the elements of Greco-Roman perspective, impressionism was created by restructuring the elements of Renaissance perspective, and modern art was created by restructuring the elements of impressionism. European perspective has thus been through at least two complete cycles of separating and recombining these elements in the quest for new images. In short, the various techniques involved in mimesis--creating an illusion--have furnished fertile ground for two millennia of creative strategy in painting." 9
"Medieval painters felt as if they existed in, and were a part of, their pictorial world, while during the Renaissance, painters of perspective stood outside the world they represented and observed--as if through a window--from a single, unifying viewpoint." 13
Middle Ages:
"abstraction, rigidity, and simplification were a symbol for the divine" 19
'"When we cannot take hold of or show the thing ... then we signify, we go through the detour of signs". The sign is a deferred presence.' From Derrida 25
"The degree of realism to which an object is said to be represented depends primarily on how expertly the painter captures or improves upon the image in terms of current conventions. When we say that a picture looks like nature, we mean that it matches the manner in which we have usually seen nature depicted." 33
"All newly invented visual elements of realism in painting may for a time conflict with the realism of elements already in use and thus strike contemporaries of the artist as strange, yet at the same time as markedly true." 34
"No single painting can depict a whole 'truth'. Each painting is only a supplementary view of any external 'truth'." 36
Proto-Renaissance
"With the invention of perspective, art seemed to have become science." 37
"Renaissance perspective was not a truth waiting to be discovered, but a convention, and invented style, instigated by society's priorities and assumptions, and therefore matching the beliefs and ideologies of the culture so well that its limitations and boundaries were all but invisible to the Renaissance viewer." 38
"Abolishing the dualistic borderlines between such concepts as the sacred and the profane gave secular art a sudden access to emotional vistas previously accessible only through religion. Thus, the creation of art could be equated with religious inspiration, and genius became linked with divine inspiration." 55
"These meanings are not easily apparent, and when we work to discover them we tend to accept them as 'fact' more easily than those obviously discursive elements like the halo that seems obviously propagandistic." "'Truth cannot reside in the obvious, the central, the stressed, but only in the hidden, the peripheral, the unemphasized.'" "Perspective...is persuasive, rather than true." 60
Baroque:
"Perhaps two centuries of seeing and accepting the world, and its space, represented in painting by means of the mathematical precision of the Renaissance system of perspective had some bearing on the seventeenth century's readiness to accept mathematics as an important key to reality." 90
On Caravaggio as developing area in front of, and beyond the "stage of the painting": "Painting before Caravaggio could move backward, it could step sideways, it could climb walls, but it could not march forward; it could not create its own destiny." --Stella 99
"Caravaggio used these ideas to create paintings with a new power, paintings that expressed a living Cartesian presence by their invasion of the viewer's own space." 100
Rococo:
"Emotional experiences were of interest in and of themselves rather than because of their tendency to create better citizens. The art work became 'more like an icon than a cudgel, and less likely than before to do anyone any harm. Or, one might add, any good'." 102
"What was important was the image of the painting, not the image in the painting. ...The figures in a painting were no longer important as single images, only as structure to fabricate a unifed spatial image." "Once again, important priorities had been reversed. Once space had been created to showcase man: man was the primary focus. Now man was used to create space: space assumed primacy." 107
Roots of Modernism:
"With the creation of non-Euclidean geometries, it became clear that mathematicians were not recording nature so much as interpreting it." 116
"Every method of depicting the world is based on the subjective selection of pertinent facts." 118
"Painting was no longer 'a window on the world, but a separate and autonomous entity, with its own particular, and strange, history.' " 123
"The Renaissance perception of man as the center of the universe stands in opposition to modern man's sense of being just another rather trivial element in the giant tapestry of an ever-expanding universe--a slight distortion, an insignificant point, in the fabric of infinity." 130
"In both the cathedral series and the haystack series, Monet not only implied a passage of time but indeed 'fragmented his object into a succession of moments of observation.' ...slices of time." 130
"Flatness was often understood to be compatible with the attributes of the common man: it was plain, workmanlike, and emphatic, and the loaded brushes were considered appropriate tools; thus, painting was considered to be honest manual labor." 142
"The unbroken unity of the surface was interpreted, especially by Cezanne, as a sign for the unrelenting consistency and evenness of sight itself." 143
"The atom bomb had made it impossible to express the anxieties and fears that formed the foundation of modern ideology in the same terms that had worked so well for the two previous generations 'without falling into the grotesque or the facile'" "Abstract expressionism became a metaphor for freedom; Schlesinger, however, had maintained that freedom was impossible without alienation and anxiety." 162
"Before the advent of modern art and its concern with space as the content of art, painters referred to their work as 'pictures'. ...But the modernists began to call their work 'paintings,' and what a thing is called begins to influence the thinking about it. Those who called their work paintings had a tendency to be less mimetic than others; they began to think of the painting as an object, complete unto itself." 169
"As the content of painting came to be thought of as less objectified or less phenomenologically real, the painting itself was forced to be considered more so" 172
"Illusion was now congruent with reality. This curtain--the marks on the opaque picture plane--was the cause of the illusion, and the illusion is the cause of the curtain; thus cause and effect are recursively inverted." 183
"Those ingredients that are noticeably absent may be said to be of as much importance as those that are present. Often a painter is, in effect, trapped by what offends him or her; one's direction may come to be defined by those ideas most rigorously avoided. 184
"The Renaissance emphasis on Euclidean geometry is the search for the known, the clear, the rational, the mathematical, and the provable. Non-Euclidean thought, however, traverses the region of the unknown, the assumed, the conjectural, the ambiguous, and the imaginary." 186
"The best art training institutions have always concentrated on turning out painters, not paintings." 194
"But formalists felt that the aesthetic was spiritual. They believed the aesthetic experience was related to, or the same as, a religious experience. This seems to be a principal difference between modern and postmodern painting. Modern art pursued the transcendental; postmodern art aspires to more intellectual and discursive interests." 212
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