Sunday, December 8, 2024

Something else.

 


In his 1980 book Shock of the New, Australian art critic Robert Hughes writes:

By 1979 the idea of the avant-garde had gone. This sudden metamorphosis of the popular clichés of art criticism into an unword took a great number of people by surprise. For those who still believed that art had some practical revolutionary function, it was as baffling as the evaporation of the American left after 1970. But ideas exist for as long as people use them, and by 1976 "avant-garde" was a useless concept: social reality and actual behaviour had rendered it obsolete.

The artists of The Pictures Generation probably wouldn't object too strongly to Hughes's judgment and might well share it. Still, the loose-knit group did seem to suggest a post-avant-garde avant-garde. Their work was like Pop Art in that it borrowed imagery from mass culture, but tended to be drier, more analytical, in some cases less material. 

John Baldessari, a 6'8 bear of a man from the rural part of Southern California, was an unlikely mentor figure. But his hybrid visual art―straddling photography, printmaking, painting, and collage―made him apt. There's a playful alienation to a lot of it, intentional mislabeling, figures whose faces are covered with absurd shapes. And his reputation would continue to grow, Baldessari eventually attaining the immortality that comes with voicing yourself on The Simpsons. (After it had started to suck, but still.)

"The Table Lamp and Its Shadows", seen above, comes from a 1994 series of monotypes. It serves as a traditional kind of art: the still life. There's something a little off-kilter about it, though. Maybe it's the way the cord glows yellow and disappears into the blank white background. It captures the paranoid feeling of being out of place in a hotel room.


1 comment:

susan said...

I have to say The Pictures generation of artists is a style or period that I'd never heard of at all. I agree Baldessari's work is interesting, I especially enjoyed the funeral and cremation he did of all his earlier paintings. That takes some bravery as I can personally attest. But that's neither here nor there, what I like most about his images that I've see is their sense of removal from the surrounding world. It was interesting to learn he was an art teacher for many years.

The person your post made me most interested in getting to know is Robert Hughes himself. I've found a link to the videos he made of The Shock of the New on youtube which I intend to watch in total. Even having seen one episode (the 7th) I understand why it is that art had to change when the pastoral landscape was no longer dominant. I don't happen to favor much modern art but I have to say my preference for the classical makes sense.

I've been enjoying his quotes as well:

“But aesthetic value does not rise from the work's apparent ability to predict a future: we do not admire Cézanne because of the Cubists drew on him. Value rises from deep in the work itself - from its vitality, its intrinsic qualities, its address to the senses, intellect, and imagination; from the uses it makes of the concrete body of tradition. In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity. Not even the greatest doctor in Bologna in the 17th century knew as much about the human body as today's third-year medical student. But nobody alive today can draw as well as Rembrandt or Goya.”
― Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New

I also liked this one from a book he's written about Catalan - I've long appreciated their spirit:

“The most famous political dictum of early Catalunya was uttered there—the unique oath of allegiance sworn by Catalans and Aragonese to the Spanish monarch in Madrid. “We, who are as good as you, swear to you, who are no better than us, to accept you as our king and sovereign lord, provided you observe all our liberties and laws—but if not, not.”
― Robert Hughes, Barcelona: the Great Enchantress