Fondazione Prada, Milano - Emmadefelice
FOR MY BEST FAMILY MERIEM BENNANI
Francis Bacon
ART IN THE PARK (Under Construction)
Louise Bourgeois
“Monte di Pietà” project: PAWNSHIP A PROJECT BY CHRISTOPH BÜCHEL
東京現代・Tokyo Gendai
Mika Kato: Evanescent, Yet Powerful, Elaborate Expressions and Changes, Starting Afresh by “Forgetting Art as One Knew it.”
June 22 - July 20, 2024
TOMIO KOYAMA GALLERY ROPPONGI, Tokyo
Sara Berman – Lapdogs and Fools
CYNTHIA DAIGNAULT The Lemon
In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust
At the time, given that I had no idea then of the influence that family would have on my life, this mention should have passed me illy by. But it gave me a sharp stab of pain, the pain felt by a self that had long since mostly ceased to exist but which could still mourn the absence of Gilberte. For a conversation about the family of the "chief undersecretary at the Postmaster General's," which Gilberte and her father had once had in my presence, had gone completely from my mind. Memories of love are, in fact, no exception to the general laws of remember-ing, which are themselves subject to the more general laws of habit. Habit weakens all things; but the things that are best at reminding us of a person are those which, because they were insignificant, we have for-gotten, and which have therefore lost none of their power. Which is why the greater part of our memory exists outside us, in a dampish breeze, in the musty air of a bedroom or the smell of autumn's first fires, things through which we can retrieve any part of us that the reasoning mind, having no use for it, disdained, the last vestige of the past, the best of it, the part which, after all our tears seem to have dried, can make us weep again. Outside us? Inside us, more like, but stored away from our mind's eye, in that abeyance of memory which may last for-ever. It is only because we have forgotten that we can now and then return to the person we once were, envisage things as that person did, be hurt again, because we are not ourselves anymore, but someone else, who once loved something that we no longer care about. The broad daylight of habitual memory gradually fades our images of the past, wears them away until nothing is left of them and the past becomes irrecoverable. Or, rather, it would be irrecoverable, were it not that a few words (such as "chief undersecretary at the Postmaster General's") had been carefully put away and forgotten, much as a copy of a book is deposited in the Bibliothèque Nationale against the day when it may become unobtainable.
Page 222, Book 2 of In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust, Translation by James Grieve
A NEW HISTORY OF WESTERN ART
The marriage of art and ideology became a recurring phenomenon in the course of the twentieth century. Few of the many successive and overlapping 'isms' were entirely free of political, ideological or philosophical underpinnings. The democratisation of art and visual language enabled artists to develop revolutionary or reactionary reflexes, become politically or religiously engaged or, at the very least, pick a side in national and international conflicts. There are countless examples of politically engaged works of art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They seldom attained the status of Manet's Execution of Emperor Maximilian or Picasso's Guernica, but the reciprocal influence between art and politics and/or religion remains a constant factor to this day. Ai Wei and Banksy [4.105] are the most recent examples of artists who systematically address political issues, but countless others have gone before them in recent decades.
If we view the political and religious component of art from a long historical perspective- as we have sought to do in this chapter - it is notable that today's artists rarely allow themselvesto be used by the political powers-that-be. On the contrary, they almost systematically embody public opposition, the gnawing conscience of the nation, especially in the Western democracies. More than that, the work of artists who dance to the tune of autocratic regimes is simply not perceived as art in democratic countries. This creates fascinating paradoxes, such as the majestic, classicising statues of exotic dictators that are reviled as kitsch in Europe, even though similar statues from antiquity were seen as authoritative there until well into the twentieth century. Sculpted tributes, like the statues dedicated to the guardians of the demos in Athens twenty-five centuries ago, are still carved from blocks of marble, only now the busts are those of presidents and prime ministers. You will not find them in surveys of important artworks, except perhaps as negative examples. This conundrum illustrates how we citizens of the twenty-first century struggle with our own visual past and how certain genres and types of art have been contaminated by twenty-five centuries of political history. Above all, however, it shows how art has been transformed from a weapon of the powerful into one that is now also wielded by the people.
NEW HISTORY OF WESTERN ART
Science and technology laid claim to the image as a mechanism for visual registration, with the result that it was scientists at this juncture in history who oversaw the birth of new imaging techniques. Where Jan van Eyck (if Vasari is to be believed) had experimented with alchemy and distillation' to improve the binding and drying of oil paint, the key inventions in the nineteenth century were mechanical and chemical applications developed in the laboratory. Visual images were still the indispensable key to intellectual development they had been in the mind of Leonardo, but now it was no longer necessarily the artist who would shape those images. The academic artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been swayed by the ancient idea of ut pictura poesis, becoming caught up in the notion that visual art is fundamentally linguistic and narrative in character and hence, like language, can and must be encoded in clear grammar. Painting (and to a lesser extent sculpture), which still held out the promise in the Renaissance of becoming a vital link in the epistemological chain, was now reduced to the same status as literature - not even poetry - with the emphasis on the narrative component. History painting, in other words.
It ought not to be a surprise, therefore, that it was poets and novelists such as Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) and Émile Zola (1840-1902) who became fervent champions of the visual arts from the mid-nineteenth century, as we saw in a previous chapter. They stressed the role of imagination and emotion in the artistic interpretation of the world - something that was too important for mechanical photography, which was still in its infancy at the time. In a famous passage from 'Le moment artistique' (L'Événement, 1866), Zola argued, in what would become an important dictum for the twentieth century, that what art can add to reality is humanity.
PHOTOGRAPHY: THE ULTIMATE MARRIAGE OF ART AND SCIENCE
