Modernity lecture 2 2011
Transcript of Modernity lecture 2 2011
Concepts of Modernity Current manifestations in the visual arts
Week 2 March 7 2011
Poetics of the unconscious- Personal Expression
Modernity lecture CAI202
Lecturer Caroline Rannersberger [email protected]
Overview
• Recap of modernism
• Context of modernity in 21st century
• Snapshot of Expressionism
• Surrealism in Europe
• Contemporary painting and the poetic of the unconscious
• Surrealism and Australian modernism
SourcesPoetics of the unconscious- Personal Expression
(A focus on Surrealism)
Harrison, Charles, and Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory1900-1990. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993:pp.440-450: (4)André Breton: Surrealism and Painting; (5)André Breton from the Second Manifesto of Surrealism
Hughes, Robert. The Shock of the New. London: BBCBooks, 1991: Chapter Five: The Threshold of Liberty
Artists: Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico, Henri Rousseau,Joan Miró, René Magritte, as well as contemporary Australian artists.
Extension: Find contemporary Australia artists working with similar ideas/methods. Refer Art Almanac http://www.art-almanac.com.au/ for overview of artists and follow the links to public/commercial galleries. Also refer electronic/hard copy art journals: Art Monthly, Art & Australia, Artlink, etc available in the CDU library/online database.
•Enlightenment and enlightened thinking •(contrast counter enlightenment: Isaiah Berlin 1901-1997)
•science, reason, truth= the basis of knowledge
•be free from established systems of thinking/ grand narratives
•break from the past and its romantic, emotive belief in god and religion
Recap: modernism and modern way of thinking
21st century = the banality of modernity
•Critique of the rise of industry and economic development and its manifestations of banality
•Indictment of the banality that characterizes modern life
•21stC slick, pretty, traditional surfaces critiquing aspects of modernism
•See through the superficiality and into a cultural analysis
Francisco Goya: ‘Father of modernity’ 1746-1828
Francisco Goya, "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters," published 1799
•Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (30 March 1746 – 16 April 1828)
•Spanish romantic painter and printmaker
•last of the Old Masters
•first of the moderns
Thought/ the unconscious = new reality
Goya (Spanish romantic 18th/19thC): El sueño de la razón produce monstruos: When reasons dream, monsters are born (Hughes,p.213)
thought creates a parallel world = dreams
the irrational =human nature
mental derangement gives way to the dark side of the mind / locus of irrefutable truths about society
Adapted from: 1 Hughes, Robert. The Shock of the New. London: BBC Books, 1991.pp 212-216
•Is manifested in modernist movements including:
•Expressionism (means of personal /emotive expression through painterly methods)
•Surrealism (means of unconscious expression through rejection of realism and the rational)
Poetics of the unconscious- Personal Expression
Expressionsim: A snapshot
Edvard Munch; The Scream (or The Cry)
1893; 150 Kb; Casein/waxed crayon and tempera on paper (cardboard), 91 x 73.5 cm (35 7/8 x 29"); Nasjonalgalleriet (National Gallery), Oslo
Norwegian painter and printmaker; symbolist
“the study of the soul, that is to say the study of my own self” José María Faerna, Munch, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1995, p. 16
icon of existential anguish; personal expression and the unconscious;intense, evocative paintings influence on German Expressionism early 20th century
The Scream; Edvard Munch 1863-1944
"I was walking down the road with two friends when the sun set; suddenly, the sky turned as red as blood. I stopped and leaned against the fence, feeling unspeakably tired. Tongues of fire and blood stretched over the bluish black fjord. My friends went on walking, while I lagged behind, shivering with fear. Then I heard the enormous, infinite scream of nature."
(Faerna, 1995, p. 1)
The Scream; Edvard Munch 1863-1944
“Man is crying out for his soul, the whole period becomes a single urgent cry.And art cries too, into the deep darkness, crying for help, crying for the spirit.That is Expressionism”(Hermann Bahr, Expressionism, Munich, 1916)
German Expressionist Painting 1905-1914
Born Austria
Self portrait 1912
Oil on wood, 42.3x33.8cm
German Expressionists: Egon Schiele 1890-1918
Männlicher Akt, Selbstporträt 1910
55,7 × 36,8 cmBleistift, Tempera aquarelliert auf Papier
German Expressionists: Egon Schiele 1890-1918
Germans:Max Beckmann,
Otto Dix,
George Grosz,
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke,
Emil Nolde,
Max Pechstein;
the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka,
the Czech Alfred Kubin
the Norwegian Edvard Munch
the Russian Wassily Kandinsky
Expressionists include:
Surrealism
André Breton 1896-1966: First Manifesto of Surrealism 1924
‘SURREALISM,n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, but which one proposes to express –
verbally by written means of the word, or in any other manner - the actual functioning of thought.
Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or
moral concern’.
Harrison, Charles, and Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory 1900-1990. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.p. 438
‘Utter bankruptcy of art criticism, a bankruptcy that is really comic:...whether Chagall happens to be
considered a surrealist or not, are matters for grocers’ assistants’.
Harrison, Charles, and Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory 1900-1990. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.pp. 445
André Breton 1896-1966:
From ‘Surrealism and Painting’ 1928
André Breton 1896-1966: First Manifesto of Surrealism 1924
‘This summer the roses are blue; the wood is of glass. The earth, draped in its verdant cloak,
makes as little impression upon me as a ghost...Existence is elsewhere’.
Harrison, Charles, and Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory 1900-1990. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.p. 439
‘The case against the realistic attitude demands to be examined, following the case against the
materialistic attitude’.
‘We are still living under the reign of logic...But in this day and age logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest’.
Harrison, Charles, and Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory 1900-1990. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.p. 433
André Breton 1896-1966: First Manifesto of Surrealism 1924
‘Freud very rightly brought his critical faculties to bear upon the dream’.
‘I have no choice but to consider [the waking state] a phenomenon of interference’.
‘The mind of the man who dreams is fully satisfied by what happens to him’.
Harrison, Charles, and Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory 1900-1990. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.p. 435
André Breton 1896-1966: First Manifesto of Surrealism 1924
Surrealism: Henri Rousseau (1844-1910)
The Dream 1910; Oil on canvas 80.5x117.5 inchesHughes, Robert. The Shock of the New. London: BBC Books, 1991. p. 229
Surrealism: 3 kinds of expression: Primitive
Child art, the art of the mad and primitive (naif) art
Rousseau, ‘the customs man’ : Primitive art, but:
Rousseau to Picasso: ‘We are the two greatest living painters, I in the modern manner you in the Egyptian’
Hughes: ‘The clarity of Rousseau’s vision further heightened its compulsive, dreamlike quality: there the image is, all at once, with no ambiguities, done
(as he would have insisted) from life.’Hughes, Robert. The Shock of the New. London: BBC Books, 1991. p. 227-9
Surrealism: 3 kinds of expression: child art
Joan Miró 1893-1983
Child art =outlet of the uncensored, polymorphous self
Child art = special cultural form which can disclose the nature of the mind
Seen through the mimicry of a child’s freedom by adults
The best pure painter of the Surrealists (Hughes)
Resisted the movement, but they joined him
For the assassination of painting; a dislike for the bourgeois
Hughes, Robert. The Shock of the New. London: BBC Books, 1991. p. 231
Surrealism: Joan Miró 1893-1983
The tilled field 1923-4; oil on canvas; 26x36.5 inches
Metamorphosis: ‘Everything in this landscape has the power to become something else’ (Hughes)
Hughes, Robert. The Shock of the New. London: BBC Books, 1991. p. 231-2
Surrealism: Joan Miró 1893-1983
The harlequin’s carnival 1924-5; oil on canvas; 26x36.5 inches
‘Miro claimed that hallucinations brought on by hunger and staring at the cracks in the plaster during those lean Paris years helped to loosen his imagery, as
mescaline might’ (Hughes)Hughes, Robert. The Shock of the New. London: BBC Books, 1991. p. 235
Surrealism: Joan Miró 1893-1983
The harlequin’s carnival 1924-5; oil on canvas; 26x36.5 inches
Miro: ‘There are tiny forms in vast empty spaces. Empty space, empty horizons, empty plains, everything that is stripped has always impressed me’
Hughes, Robert. The Shock of the New. London: BBC Books, 1991. p. 235
André Breton 1896-1966:
From ‘Surrealism and Painting’ 1928
‘In such a domain, [what I believe with my eyes], I dispose of a power of illusion whose limits, if I am
not careful, I cease to perceive’.
‘Let us not forget that in this epoch it is reality itself that is in question’
Harrison, Charles, and Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory 1900-1990. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.pp. 441,442
Magritte's La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images) (1928-9) or Ceci n'est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe). Oil on canvas 23.5x37 inches
René François Ghislain Magritte (1898 – 1967)
‘Picasso, creator of toys for adults, has caused man to grow up, and sometimes under the guise of exasperating him, has put an end to his puerile
fidgeting’.
‘I believe that men will long continue to feel the need of following to its source the magical river flowing from their eyes, bathing with the same
hallucinatory light and shade both the things that are and the things that are not.’
Harrison, Charles, and Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory 1900-1990. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.pp. 444
André Breton 1896-1966:
From‘Surrealism and Painting’ 1928
Pablo Picasso: Concepts of surrealism
Guernica 1937; Oil on Canvas; 349 cm × 776 cm (137.4 in × 305.5 in)‘...this bull is a bull and this horse is a horse... If you give a meaning to certain things in my
paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for
the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.’http://www.pbs.org/treasuresoftheworld/a_nav/guernica_nav/gnav_level_1/5meaning_guerfrm.html
Pablo Picasso: Concepts of surrealism
‘Picasso was never a member of the surrealist circle but was rightly admired by Surrealism for his sense of metamorphosis...’
Hughes, Robert. The Shock of the New. London: BBC Books, 1991. p.252
Surrealism: ‘a special part of its function is to examine with a critical eye the notions of reality and unreality, reason and irrationality, reflection
and impulse, knowledge and fatal ignorance, usefulness and uselessness’.
Harrison, Charles, and Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory 1900-1990. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.pp. 446-7 (Second Manifesto of Surrealism 1929)
André Breton 1896-1966:
From ‘Second Manifesto of Surrealism’ 1929
Europe after the rain 1940-2; Oil on canvas 21.5x58.25inches
Hughes: ‘A panorama of a fungoid landscape seen as though in the aftermath of an annihilating, biblical deluge. Ernst got away to America when the German armies rolled into
France.’
Frottage/decalcomania method of lifting off paint and putting it down creates illusionary effect of reality.
Hughes, Robert. The Shock of the New. London: BBC Books, 1991. p.255
Max Ernst
Europe after the rain 1940-2; Oil on canvas 21.5x58.25inches
‘Here [in early collage works] I discover elements of a figuration so remote that its very absurdity provokes in me a sudden intensification of my faculties of sight - a hallucinatory
succession of contradictory images...’
Ernst in Hughes, Robert. The Shock of the New. London: BBC Books, 1991. p.224-5
Max Ernst
The poetic unconscious and contemporary thought/painting
1920s
‘The region where the charming vapours of the as yet unknown, with which they are to fall in love,
condense, will appear to them in a lightning flash.’Harrison, Charles, and Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory 1900-1990. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.pp. 444
2009Jean-Luc Nancy identified a need to ‘rediscover, in an as yet unknown mode, what those who lived in myths knew in a totally different mode: there is a
universal communication and participation of beings, that is to say of bodies in the world’.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "Making Sense." In Making Sense. University of Cambridge, UK, 2009. (Key note speaker, Making Sense Conference)
André Breton 1896-1966:
From‘Surrealism and Painting’ 1928
‘Just as in the physical world,a short circuit occurs when the two ‘poles’ of a machine are joined by a conductor of little or no resistance....Surrealism has done everything it can and more to increase
these short circuits’.
Harrison, Charles, and Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory 1900-1990. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.pp. 449 (Second Manifesto of Surrealism 1929)
André Breton 1896-1966:
From ‘Second Manifesto of Surrealism’ 1929: Short Circuits
‘Žižek is interested in the "parallax gap" separating two points between which no synthesis or
mediation is possible, linked by an "impossible short circuit" of levels that can never meet. From
this consideration of parallax, Žižek begins a rehabilitation of dialectical materialism. ’
Žižek, Slavoj. Parallax View. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006.
Short Circuits and Slavoj Žižek 2006
Parallax: Sigmar Polke
Seeing rays 2006; mixed mediums on fabric; 541⁄4 x 46 inches
Draws from an engraving by 17thC Johann Zahn that depicts two gentlemen observing the sky from different vantage points
Surrealism and Australian
modernism/modernity
Bushrangers and parrots 1960
Ivan Durrant: ‘Pearce, as painted by Albert Tucker, is the summary of all and more that is bad in humans. He is the ultimate destructive intruder... Just look at those viciously protruding, cutting and slicing shark teeth; what a
brutal axe-head, alien monster and the devil himself!’Albert Tucker Exhibition: The Intruder - The perfect Allegory, curated by Ivan Durant, June 1- August 10 2009
Art Monthly Australia; Issue 229, May 2010 pp.27-29
Surrealism and Australian modernism
Albert Tucker (1914 – 1999)
Truth:‘A day will come when we no longer allow ourselves to use [the truth] in such a cavalier fashion,...with its palpable proofs of existence
other than the one we think we are living’.
Harrison, Charles, and Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory 1900-1990. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.pp. 450 (Second Manifesto of Surrealism 1929)
André Breton 1896-1966:
From ‘Second Manifesto of Surrealism’ 1929
Angry Penguins, an Australian literary and artistic avant- garde movement of the 1940s
Early Australian exponents of surrealism and expressionism
John Perceval,, Arthur Boyd Sidney Nolan,Danila Vassileff, Albert Tucker, Joy Hester
The Ern Malley hoax
Surrealism and Australian modernism
Angry Penguins 1940s
Surrealism and Australian modernism
Angry Penguins 1940s
Truth:‘According to Australian curator Margie West, discussed in relation to Wamud Namok, the metaphysical world embodies spirits which exist “not just as metaphysical notions but as palpable
manifestations in the material world”.
West, Margie. "Bardayal Nadjamerrek: Wild Honey Painter." Art & Australia 46 Spring, no. 1 (2008): 120-25.
Wamud Namok AO / Margie West 2008
Truth and Myth/ The Metaphysical: Wamud Namok AO
Wamud Namok AO Dulklorrkelorrkeng and Wakkewakken; 2005Bark painting; natural earth pigments on stringy bark; 83x 151cm
“[...] I can see you all, I can see you here in my country you Wakkewakken [legless honey spirits]”
Wamud Namok in West, Margie. "Bardayal Nadjamerrek: Wild Honey Painter." Art & Australia 46 Spring, no. 1 (2008): 120-25.