Titian, Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, c. 1515
nickkahler reblogged
Alexander Rodchenko, Untitled Composition, 1918 (via transistor)
It's beyond time for a new generation of art historians not only to open up the system and let art be the garden that it is, home to exotic blooms of known and unknown phenomena. It's time to work against this system. We can't say painting is dead just as women and artist of color started to show up in art history. Our art history has stiffened into an ideology that clear-cuts a medium, pronounces it dead (like undertakers) and moves on like conquistadors to the next stage. The idea that art has an overall goal of advancing or perfecting its terms and techniques is made up. Imagined. Idiotic. Except to those benefiting from this intellectual fundamentalism. Someday, people will look back at this phase of art history the way we look back at manifest destiny and colonialism.
Whether one knows art history or not, art begins pre-intellectually, beyond language. Art is a search for new paths of encounter and poetic structures, images and things that go beyond themselves.
Jerry Saltz, “The Tyranny of Art History in Contemporary Art,” 2016
For these artists every object contains the whole world and is part of a family of forms. They look at the world in a meta way; inspiration is a compelling force from within. Not art history. In this holistic way the whole shapes the parts, taxonomical units cohere into clouds, microcosms mushroom into macrocosms, webs of interrelationship form. These artists are in search of what might be called ur-forms, conceptual templates, archetypal systems, secret chords, flows, things here for millions of centuries that are embedded in materials and in the fabric of time.
Jerry Saltz, “The Tyranny of Art History in Contemporary Art,” 2016
Our art history is not chronological; not neutral or about simultaneous cross-styles, outliers, and other things going on at any given moment. Our art history is organized teleologically — it's an arrow. Things are always said to be going forward, and progress is measured mainly in formal ways by changes in ideas of space, color, composition, subject matter, and the like. Artists and isms follow one another in a Biblical begatting based on progress toward a goal or a higher stage.
Jerry Saltz, “The Tyranny of Art History in Contemporary Art,” 2016
These days our definition of it is mainly art informed by other art and art history. Especially in the last two centuries — and tenaciously of late — art has examined its own essences, ordinances, techniques, tools, materials, presentational modes, and forms. To be thought of as an artist someone must self-identify as one and make what they think of as art. This center cannot hold. Why? It is far too tight to let real art breathe.
Jerry Saltz, “The Tyranny of Art History in Contemporary Art,” 2016
Art history is not predictable, it's not linear in that way. Unexpected youth will always change the course because they will always transgress those who came before.
Richard Serra, Interview with Charlie Rose, 2001
A work of art exists as a part of a never-ending conversation—as statement or reply, parody or tangent. Erasure of others’ material, whether crossing out the words of a predecessor or demolishing a work overall, is rare in the realms of art. If there could ever be an aspect of art that life was compelled to imitate, I wish it could be one similarly respectful of civil communication.
Ed Hall, "On Vandalism and Art," 2014
Paul Klee, In the Current Six Thresholds, 1929
Paul Klee, Growth of the Night Plants, 1922