Modern Artworks Research Articles

Adorno'sComment C'est

According to Theodor Adorno, the modern artwork makes the beholder shudder and reflect, purging his habit of over-conceptualizing. Furthermore, although the modern artwork may seem incomprehensible and foreign to the beholder, it expresses only a simple message: “this is how it is.” The artwork is not in itself an imposition, demand, or confrontation, though it may have all of these effects. Ontologically, the artwork is an expression: “It is thus.” To avoid the trap of conceptualization, Adorno varies the concept-name of this simple expression throughout Aesthetic Theory—from Sosein (or So-und-nicht-anders-Seins) to So ist es (with some other variations: for example, the “Here I am” or “This is what I am” of Etruscan vases), and finally to “Comment c'est,” which Adorno equates with “that's what it's like out there” (“so geht es zu, so ist es draussen”) as well as with “how it is” (“wie es ist”). This concept-name at times appears demonstrative—“It is thus”—at times general—“how it is”—and at times self-referential—“here I am.”Although Adorno's English translator Hullot-Kentor notes that the meaning of Sosein for Adorno is equivalent to that of Beckett's “Comment c'est,” he refers to the French phrase as though it were a theoretical concept instead of the title of a prose work by Beckett published in 1961. In this essay I attempt to rectify that oversight by demonstrating that within Adorno's Aesthetic Theory Beckett's Comment c'est functions not as an artwork but as the slippage of the concept Sosein. Comment c'est remains a “comment c'est” for Adorno—not just an exemplum, or a reference, but something between a concept-name and an actual artwork: a “title” that reveals not only its own essence but also the essence of modern art. My analysis thus moves between reading Comment c'est as, on the one hand, a literalization of Adorno's ideas in Aesthetic Theory (in other words, as a kind of meta-text) and, on the other, as an exemplum of his views on the new, on unity and meaning, and on mimesis and expression. In doing so, I hope to deepen our understanding of the special place that Beckett occupies within Adorno's philosophy.

The Rise and Fall of Public Opinion: Poe to James

Edgar Allan Poe’s depiction of gossip as a source of information in “The Man That Was Used Up”(1839) is not, as many critics have suggested, an indictment of popular culture and the worship of celebrity. Rather, Poe uses gossip as a way of analyzing the ephemerality of public opinion, which served as both an extension of and a counter to print culture. When Henry James rewrites this tale in The Papers (1903), he charts the erosion of this particular version of collective power and, in the process, transforms the celebrity into a model for the modern work of art.

Ensaio sobre o espaço e o sujeito: Lygia Clark e a psicanálise

Defende-se a idéia de que a reflexão psicanalítica sobre o sujeito implica uma consideração do espaço e de sua configuração, como já indica a preocupação tópica freudiana e a busca topológica empreendida por Lacan. O descentramento do sujeito se faria acompanhar por uma subversão do espaço que foi explorada culturalmente, ao longo do século XX, por produções de arte moderna e contemporânea. Busca-se, portanto, realizar um diálogo com este tipo de produção, escolhendo-se como lócus específico a obra da artista brasileira Lygia Clark para, em contraponto a ela, propor considerações renovadas a respeito da travessia da fantasia.

Figures, figurines and Colin Renfrew

Are modern artworks really comparable in any serious way to ancient monuments? Has Colin Renfrew changed sides in the conflict of reason with intuition in modern archaeology? Leo Klejn thinks so. Colin Renfrew responds, below.

‘Seeing is believing’ and ‘believing is seeing’

The principal concern of my paper is a distinction between two ways of appreciating works of art, characterised here in terms of the phrases ‘seeing is believing’ and ‘believing is seeing’. I examine this distinction in the light of an epistemological requirement at times at least grounded in what David Davies, in his Art as Performance, refers to as the ‘common sense theory of art appreciation’ in order to assess exactly what aspect of the philosophical approach generally known as aesthetic empiricism his account commits him to reject. I argue that the ‘experiential requirement’, if only conceived in a slightly broader way than is usual, might very well have an important role to play not only in the appropriate appreciation of works that do not demonstrate the need for such a requirement (primarily works of late modern and conceptual art), but also in the ontological account Davies himself favours.

Full bloom: the art and life of Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) was one of the most successful American artists of the 20th-century: her arresting paintings of enormous, intimately rendered flowers, desert landscapes and stark white cow skulls are seminal works of modern art. But behind O'Keeffe's bold work and celebrity was a woman misunderstood by even her most ardent admirers. When she was still unknown as an artist, O'Keeffe married Alfred Stieglitz, 23 years her senior. The relationship was physically and intellectually passionate, but Atieglitz was a man of the world. Driven to a nervous breakdown by Stieglitz's affair, O'Keefe relocated and redefined herself in New Mexico, where she created her unforgettable signature paintings. Through personal material - including interviews with Dorothy Norman, Stieglitz's longtime paramour - this biography offers an insight into O'Keefe's defining relationships and the effect of her husband's infidelity, and offers an honest portrayal of a life shrouded in myth.

At the Dawn of the 21st Century: A View-Thought The Red Window (The Critical Time of the World Civilization) An Installation Art Project

This study is to investigate the possibilities of developing a cross-culturally common conceptual visual language. In particular, this study evaluates whether it is possible to develop Collaborative New Art that will depict simultaneously both the Contemporary Art and the Modern Technological Civilization in which we live today. It is a general belief especially in the art community that contemporary art and modern art can enhance the distribution of diverse information, foster a profound universality in the human nature, and thus promote cross-cultural collaborations in all walks of lives. However, such a belief has also been questioned due to the overt differences of arts in structures, styles and philosophies perceived by different viewers. In this study, a set of contemporary arts will be evaluated. The comparative results will used to discuss four important issues: What are the salient sensations and reactions of the general public to the contemporary and modern artwork? To what extent the contemporary conceptual art could disclose the new trend of social value changes. Whether the contemporary art and modern art theory and practice would address and help to solve today's social problems within each society. Whether the contemporary art and modern art has a role in harmonizing people with different geopolitical backgrounds and value systems. Finally, several implications will be discussed on the linkage issue between verbal and nor-verbal expressions of thoughts and feelings.

The next enlightenment: aesthetic reason in modern art and mass culture

Taking as its point of departure the contested claim that Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment conceptualizes a differentiated form of aesthetic reason, this essay explicates key properties of aesthetic rationality as it later was elaborated in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory. With these properties in view, it next compares modern artworks and film and discovers that aesthetic reason has taken up residence in mass culture. Adorno's confinement of aesthetic reason to modern art, and his insistence with Horkheimer that modern art and the rationality it entails are emasculated by mass culture, appear premature. As the host for aesthetic rationality, mass culture secures the rational content of modernity against the hegemony of instrumental reason. Through the increasing universalization of mass culture aesthetic reason achieves universality, placing us on the threshold of another enlightenment, an aesthetic enlightenment that would be the completion of modernity's as yet unfinished project.

Schlegel’s Fragmentary Project

This paper investigates the new form of writing-the fragmentary project-that Friedrich Schlegel developed in response to Kant's systematic philosophy. The fragments, I argue, are not anti-systematic; rather, they elucidate the idea that philosophy, like the modern work of art, no longer represents the unity of a closed system but a unity beyond the system. The fragmentary project is an ambitious attempt to find a form of philosophical coherence beyond the compulsion of a system. In contrast to the traditional view which regards the fragment as expressing relativistic, skeptic, and at bottom, anarchic sentiments, this account views the fragment as a figure of writing that does not represent but itself enacts the movement toward greater coherence and communication.

Autonomy in Post-war Art, Quasi-heroic and Casual

Autonomy has been a key term in the academic, anti-modernist culture wars of the past few decades, beginning with Marxist-inspired critiques of the view that art ought to transcend base material and political interests, and culminating in poststructuralist negations of the apparent illusion of subjective autonomy underpinning traditional understandings of aesthetic experience. At the same time, through much of the twentieth century there has been a series of attacks on the autonomy of art launched by avant-garde artists opposed to the idea that art was possessed of internal, self-generating structures and conventions that distinguished it clearly from everyday objects and phenomena. We have now reached a point, however, where the post-modern, or avantgarde, or neo-avantgarde critiques of autonomy have lost much of their edge whether this autonomy pertains to definitions of the art work, the subjectivity of the artist fashioning the work, or that of the viewer immersed in contemplating it. No longer does the prospect of escaping from some relatively autonomous arena of art into a radically heteronymous world of the everyday seem particularly radical or exciting. The trajectory is well travelled, and the normative imperatives of aesthetic autonomy too feeble for any great excitement to be generated by transgressing them. Nor is it nowadays much more than a formulaic exercise for a critic or scholar to imagine freeing him or herself from some bourgeois ideal of autonomous, self-determining subjectivity, a theoretical-critical exercise that enjoyed its high point in the academic world of the 80s and early 90s. These circumstances are a potentially fruitful context in which to revisit inherited notions of aesthetic autonomy and to examine the ethical imperatives that made it such a key issue in artistic debate of the post-war period.1 Adorno is arguably the post-war thinker who has offered the fullest and most resonant analysis of the problematics of autonomy, as these manifested themselves in art and understanding aesthetic experience over the past half century. The section on art and society in his book Aesthetic Theory, the final drafting of which he was working on at the time of his death in 1969, condensed his thinking on the complex status of modern art in a formulation that still seems remarkably incisive some four decades later. According to Adorno, the condition of any significant work of modern art is radically split between the promise of autonomy and its existence as social fact.2 A significant work of art work simultaneously resists incorporation within the fabric of the culture from which it emerges, and itself is part of that very fabric. In making this point, Adorno is not seeking to moderate modernist claims for art's autonomy by arguing that art should be seen as having a partial or relative autonomy. Rather he sees art's situation as radically paradoxical; as, on the one hand, figuring a possibility of autonomy denied by the administered world of modern capitalism and, on the other, as being immersed within a reality where sustained claims for subjective autonomy are only hollow illusions, or symptoms of an endemic social alienation and fragmentation. The perspective on issues of artistic autonomy developed in this article also owes a lot to Jacques Ranciere's recent revisiting of them in his writing on 'the aesthetic revolution and its outcomes',3 particularly in his recent book, The Partitioning of the Sensible (Le partage du sensible): Aesthetics and Politics. By

WORKING OUTSIDE THE REALMS OF TRADITIONAL METHODS AND MATERIALS

The aim of this poster is to raise awareness of the problems associated with the acquisition of modern works of art and the impact this has on collection care. It is essential to identify and record the constituents and printing details of any experimental work, including artist's intent. The development of a database to provide access to this information has been recognized as a valuable reference tool. Using a collection of prints recently acquired by the British Museum's Department of Japanese Antiquities, specific questions and areas of concern were identified:

Apprehension? Performativity and Medium-Specificity in Modern Art

The article focuses on the idea of the aesthetics. According to the author, the idea of aesthetic is a presentation of the imagination which prompts much thought, but to which no determinate thought whatsoever. It has been suggested that the aesthetic possesses discursive significance even though it cannot be adequately grasped by language or concepts. With modernist abstraction, the subtle but always seemingly precarious delineation of the aesthetic idea was featured as a crucial issue because the fine line between modern abstract art works and design patterns or ornamentation appeared to have diminished.

A Remarkable Disappearing Act

A Remarkable Disappearing Act

Interart Narrative: (Un)Reliability and Ekphrasis

As defined in my previous work, (un)reliability is one of five types of hypothesis or integration mechanism, whereby readers account for textual incongruities. In principle, we may always appeal to alternative logics of resolution: ambiguous data may be attributed to generic convention, as in the detective story, and/or to functional drives, like surprise, no less than to the teller's blind spots. What distinguishes the perspectival or the unreliability hypothesis is that it brings discordant elements into pattern by attributing them to the peculiarities of the speaker through whom the world is mediated. This links up with Meir Sternberg's model of how fictional communication works through quotation. To infer unreliability is to make sense of the text at a quotational remove, with the mediator as ironized quotee set into the overall narrative for a purpose. And the ultimate quoter along the chain of transmission is the author, our frame-sharer and our normative reference-point for every intermediate viewpoint.To test and illustrate these relations anew, they are extended here beyond the traditional semiotic boundaries of language, so that mediation extends to the very medium. My test case is a dramatic monologue in which the narrator manifests (un)reliability through verbalization of a visual artwork (throughekphrasis, in short). Here the difficulties of translating between media or art forms intersect with those of managing a quote within a quote. Semiotic and perspectival complexities arisetogether. Furthermore, to quote or re-present an artwork in words is to frame one global act of communication within another. The perspectives involved in visual discourse—painter versus beholder—are thereby reset into the verbal discourse about the visual discourse. So, in ekphrasis, the quoting chain goes from literary author to narrator to plastic artist, with their respective ends, skills,vehicles, audiences, and at times with further mediators en route. Ekphrastic speakers can therefore betray themselves—as this one does—in more ways than usual, against more diverse (e.g., aesthetic) norms and to richer ironic effects. In my example, Blake Morrison's “Teeth” (appended below), the issues and disparities of point of view multiply even further. Due to a strategic allusion to Robert Browning's “My Last Duchess,”the modern speaker unknowingly echoes the Renaissance Duke, and the Duchess's picture hovers behind the re-presentation of the modern artwork. In such light, readers infer that the monologist has similarly murdered his wife once we catch and decode the underlying intertextual cum intermedia allusion. This goes to shownot only that (un)reliability hinges on reading but also that different orders of (un)reliability (e.g., between flat and fine judgments, as on the speaker here) correlate with different orders of reading.

Autonomy, Negativity, and Illusory Transgression

Insofar as a social function can be predicated for artworks, it is their functionlessness. Through their difference from a bewitched reality, they embody negatively a position in which what is would find its rightful place, its own. -Adorno 1 The dysfunctional social function of art provides the hinge on which Theodor W. Adorno's account of autonomy turns. The account itself marks a theoretical passageway to both his critique of the culture industry and his qualified defense of modern art. As Deborah Cook demonstrates in The Culture Industry Revisited, Adorno's critique of the culture industry has three levels: an aesthetic thesis about the formulaic character of products of the culture industry, an economic thesis about the commodification of culture, and a psychological thesis about narcissistic tendencies in capitalist societies. The connection across these levels derives, in my view, from the strong links Adorno forges among three different concepts of autonomy: (1) the internal and self-critical independence of the authentic work of art; (2) the relative independence of (some of) high culture from the economic system; and (3) the autonomy of the self as a political and moral agent. He criticizes the culture industry for undermining all three types of autonomy, and he portrays authentic works of modern art as providing crucial resistance to pressures toward cultural commodification and social narcissism. In his qualified defense of modern art, as I indicate in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory,2 Adorno's account of autonomy goes roughly like this. Art has become independent from other institutions in capitalist society. Since this independence depends on political, economic, and other developments, however, the independence of art is relative to society as a whole. Art's autonomy is a matter of relative independence. Increasingly this relative independence has become tied to the production and reception of artworks whose "purposes" are internal to the works themselves. Such works, when they are authentic, are social monads whose internal processes express those of society as a whole. Being relatively independent, authentic works of modern art can enact a critique of society by engaging in self-criticism. They are like self-inflicted wounds on the body of society. They force people to face society's deeper illness-its divisions of labor, class conflict, and "exchange principle"-and they point toward remedies that art itself cannot prescribe. Adorno's account has come in for a number of criticisms. In Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Burger faults Adorno for ignoring how art itself, in its avant-garde movements, has attacked the principle of autonomy. Sabine Wilke charges Adorno with using his principle of autonomy in a gender-biased way to ignore or discredit the work of women artists.3 Noel Carroll claims that Adorno misunderstands mass art because his ideal of autonomous art tends "to misconstrue Kant's analysis of free beauty as a theory of art" (105). I myself have criticized Adorno for making autonomy a precondition for truth in art, with the effect that he discounts the truth potential of folk art, mass-mediated art, and any art prior to the solidification of fine art as a social institution in eighteenth-century Europe. Indeed, Adorno's emphasis on the autonomy of art marks a contemporary site of contention. Postcolonial theory, cultural studies, and feminist scholars criticize it as an anti-democratic vestige of Eurocentric philosophy, while post-structuralists and post-analytic philosophers dismiss it as an antiquated thesis of modernist aesthetics. In response, more sympathetic readers try to rescue Adorno's account by demonstrating its compatibility with the concerns of contemporary scholarship. Unfortunately, these rescue efforts often fail in two respects: they jettison insights in Adorno's writings that could counter theoretical deficiencies in contemporary scholarship, and they intensify practical conundrums in the arts that Adorno could not adequately address. …

Patterns in the Shadows: Attention in/to the writings of Michael Baxandall

This essay reads the collected works of Michael Baxandall as an exercise in the melancholy of art history writing. His fascination with the gap between words and images, historical scholarship and early modern works of art has implications for a general postmodern malaise: why do those of us who write about the past still cling to the hope that historical meaning can be discovered, even as we recognize the absolute futility of finding out where? The elegiac paradox of having to write about an absent past through the enduring material presence of works of art has engendered Baxandall’s very distinctive historiographic approach. The visual arts demand different modes of attention (a key concept in each of his texts) than other historical artefacts. This awareness, I argue, has provided the rationale for Baxandall’s unique focus on the variety of contexts that shadow works of art.

Invisible colors: a visual history of titles

This text presents a critical history of how modern artworks receive their titles. It examines the crucial titling modes on which modernism depends and shows that titles can rarely be understood outside the institutional parameters that made them visible - exhibitions, criticism and catalogues.

Investigating modern art

This text provides an accessible historical progression through the attempting to draw out more general issues and implications. The discussion of key figures such as Picasso, Matisse, Pollock and Warhol, and movements such as Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Minimal Art is animated by the most relevant concerns of contemporary art historical scholarship. Issues of gender and ethnicity, criticism of the accepted canon of modern art, and important social and political influences upon the institutions of art are interwoven with the discussion of particular works. Since the end of the 19th century Modernism has been the dominant force in the production of western avant-garde art. It has, however, throughout the period been subject to a variety of conservative and radical challenges. Recently many of the values assumed by the modernist avant-garde have come under fundamental scrutiny. This collection of essays aims to equip its readers with the tools to understand these debates, and the wide range of artworks to which they have been attached. Modernist myths which have appeared to make art elitist or inaccessible, or simply irrelevant, are examined, as is Postmodernism, when the questions of whether we in the late-20th century are witness to the end of the modern period, and whether the diversity of contemporary art mirrors this situation are debated. This book is part of a project funded by the Arts Council of England and the Open University, with support from the Tate Gallery and John Moores University, to meet the need for a greater critical understanding of 20th-century visual art and of recent developments in art practice. It is planned as an introductory text for teachers, gallery education staff and a wide range of students, and should provide a basis for critical discussion of modern artists, art movements and art works from a variety of viewpoints. Readers should find points to disagree with, and much to generate further debate and enquiry.

Enige onuitgegeven brieven van Willem Roelofs aan Carel vosmaer

AbstractIn the Vosmaer family archives (General State Archives, The Hague) are a few letters written by the painter Willem Roelofs to the man of letters Carel Vosmaer between 1863 and 1882. The letters indicate that Roclofs and Vosmaer were already on friendly terms while the former was living in Brussels. Six of the letters are quoted in full in this article. A letter of 1863 refers to a report drawn up by Vosmaer for Minister Thorbecke concerning the purchase of works of modern art for the government. In the same letter Roelofs intimates that his sojourn in Brussels was disappointing. In 1869 he endorsed the views expressed by Jozef Israels under a pseudonym in a magazine article, putting forward his (Israels') ideas about the modern artist's task as opposed to former, outdated notions. In his article, Israels advocated the depiction of visible reality instead of subjects clictated by literature and historical science. The article appeared in De Nederlandshz Spectator, of which Vosmaer was an editor. For another issue of the same journal that year Roelofs sketched a megalithic tomb in Tinaarlo (fig. 2), with a caption protesting at the destruction of such monuments. The following year Roelofs asked Vosmaer's advice on the establishment of a society for the cultivation of etching'. After the appearance of Vosmaer's biography of Roelofs in the magazine Eigen Haard in 1879, the painter apprised him in a letter of a few errors, providing important additional information about his artistic work and detailed study of beetles. Vosmaer incorporated this information in an issue of Onze hedendaagsche schilders devoted to Roelofs in 1882, for which the artist supplied the illustrations. A letter prompted by the galley proofs contains Roelofs' observations on a few technical aspects of his watercolours.

Pins, A Table, Works of Art

WHEN WE FIND OURSELVES face to face with a work of art it is within our world of objects and limited by our feelings about objects that this experience takes place. A culture in which objects are few, or one in which objects are commonly divided into things touched only by men or by women, or a culture in which the sacred objects are unmistakably distinguished from profane objects-each of these cultures has locked into place competing possibilities into which any new object must fall. So it is with our own industrial culture that has multiplied the numbers of things and filled in the variety of objects almost to the point of a system as extensive in variety, as wasteful in numbers, as the system of nature itself. Implicitly we locate any object by means of model objects that focus our vision in the world of things. These central or typical objects testify to our sense of work and use, our hierarchy of worth in objects and our elemental feelings about the relation of the world of things to the human world. Since the beginning of mass production we have applied two false sets of expectations, two false model objects, to the modern work of art in order to create the largest possible mental distance between the work of art and the world of everyday objects. We bring two models in our hands when we approach the work of art. The first is the museum object which we use to define the destination of works of art. The second is the craft object which we use to define the origin of the work of art. Trapped between a false model of its destination and an equally false model of its origin, the work of art hovers free of our attempted descriptions. Neither the museum object nor the craft object has been questioned as a guide to the logic of the work of art in the modern period. Nor have the framing institutions of the museum and its partner, the modern factory, been explored to locate the definitions each imposes on the nature of things. That we have experienced changes of a fundamental kind in our relation to objects because of mass production and the economy of commodity exchange is, I think, generally accepted. Hannah Arendt summarized the widely held, but I believe fundamentally wrong, claims against mass production when she wrote in The Human Condition that modern society breaks down the difference between labor and work, between objects of consumption and objects of use. The modern solution