A NEW HISTORY OF WESTERN ART by Koenraad Jonckheere

A NEW HISTORY OF WESTERN ART by Koenraad Jonckheere

• page15

• [[A NEW HISTORY OF WESTERN ART]], [[Koenraad Jonckheere]], page 15, introduction

• The opening up of the discipline of art history in the twentieth century provides the basis for how this book is structured. Art history took off in the previous century, with increasingly frequent attempts to explain artistic developments from new and interdisciplinary angles. These innovations relied on a succession of big names: art historians who creatively scrutinised the history of their own field before thoroughly transforming it. Some of them - Heinrich Wölfflin or Max J. Friedländer, for instance - developed classic models for the study of style and authenticity, while others presented new interpretative concepts and structures. One such was Aby Warburg, who pioneered iconology - an innovative discipline that evolved out of iconography, with the goal of interpreting visual language within a broad context. Furthermore, the focus of art historiography has shifted in recent decades away from the relationship between artist and artwork toward reception aesthetic' (the way the work has been received by the public over the centuries) on the one hand and 'technical art history' (the study of the material and technical characteristics of the objects) on the other.

• The fresh interest in an artwork's various layers of meaning ranged from the elementary analysis of their iconography through to their complex contextual interpretation. In pursuing that interest, the aforementioned art historians were among those who, from the twentieth century onwards, consistently drew on insights from other academic disciplines: economics, the history of science, neurology, sociology, anthropology, religious studies, chemistry, mathematics etc. As a result of this, art history is no longer purely 'historical' (based on source research) or formalist (stylistic history), but has transformed itself into a Bildwissenschaft, the study of visual culture. In this way, art has increasingly been examined from entirely new perspectives, with the emphasis in many cases no longer on aesthetic value but rather on the way in which its visual language functions within a given culture and context. This tendency has been reinforced by the steadily advancing visualisation of communication in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Today's newspaper front pages are filled with photographs rather than text. Images capture the stories told on social media, with millions of photos and videos uploaded to the Internet every day. In this digital world, even the physical relationship with the material object seems to be disappearing. Aesthetic images flash by and seldom appear in physical form any more. Prolonged contemplation has given way to fleeting stimuli.

• This book considers art as a catalyst. the object that absorbs meanings and history and drives the chemistry of thought processes. Separate from the aesthetic experience or intriguing concept alone, art is the materialisation of new technologies, the visualisation of new societal paradigms or even the financial valorisation of a perception. Art is the instrument of politics and religion, the pacesetter

• of revolutions and the spark that triggers extreme reactions, such as image-smashing. Art is a visual idiom, the vehicle of unlimited meaning but, above all, an exceptionally powerful form of communication, all with a touch of magic, as Johannes à Porta recognised.

• The book does not agree in this sense with Ernst Gombrich's famous statement that 'There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists? To claim the opposite would be going too far, but the least we can say is that it is the works of art that call the shots. They are first and foremost wonderful objects in which an infinite number of stories that appeal to the imagination cohere. The upshot of this is also that beauty and taste are not the be-all and end-all either; they are merely one link in a complex of factors.

A NEW HISTORY OF WESTERN ART by Koenraad Jonckheere

• A NEW HISTORY OF WESTERN ART by Koenraad Jonckheere

• page13

  • To explain the nature of art, (Johannes) à Porta (D’net Der Beeltstormers, The Net of the Iconoclasts, 1591) came up with an affecting metaphor. Imagine a young woman, he wrote, recently married and still deeply in love. But her husband must go to war (an everyday reality in 1591). He will be gone for months at least and might never return. Just before he leaves, he gives her a small portrait of himself - her only keepsake. What happens then, Johannes à Porta says, is magical: the meaning (the declaration of love) merges with the object. You could imprint it on your memory, you could even create a perfect copy, yet the relic value assumed by that original portrait makes it irreplaceable. For the young woman, the likeness of her husband could never be replicated. The panel would become her treasured possession. It is the same reason you carry a crumpled photo of a loved one in your wallet for years and cannot bring yourself to tear it up, even though nowadays you could easily copy or digitise it.

  • According to à Porta, this is precisely what happens with art: if a powerful connection arises between the meaning of an object and its viewer owner, that meaning will merge with the object itself. The work of art or the image becomes the physical relic of a raw emotion or a compelling memory. Something irreplaceable. Art to à Porta was a question of faith: a work of art becomes important if you believe in its history, its significance, and so forth - in every layer of meaning, in short, that inheres within the object.The stronger the cognitive and emotional bond, the more powerful the effect. It is for the same reason that a mechanically produced urinal can become a world-famous work of art. If it is presented as art at the right time, in the right place, in the right context and by the right artist, the original does not even have to be preserved. I refer, of course, to Fountain (1917) by Marcel Duchamp, which now exists purely in the form of replicas. Yet placed on a pedestal behind glass in the world’s most prestigious museums, even those appeal to the imagination.

Akakdemie-X, Christopher Williams

[[akademie-X]], [[Christopher Williams]]

• Lesson 35 - No Plexiglas, No Electricity, No Humour; or Love is Colder Than Death, page 36

• PAYING ATTENTION TO OTHERS - Pay attention to what other artists are doing. It gets harder and harder as the amount of art being produced keeps growing, but it’s super important to know what your colleagues are up to. To be able to think about the present historically, you have to look at as much as you can right now. There’s a more social aspect to it as well, which is that, if you expect people to pay attention to your work, you need to pay attention to theirs… artists such as John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha continue to go to galleries every month, getting to know younger artists and constantly looking at other people’s work.
  
  

• It’s important to absorb as much information as possible but then to think through your materials.

Akademie-X, Christopher Williams

• Lesson 35 - No Plexiglas, No Electricity, No Humour; or Love is Colder Than Death

• So many young artists I meet don't seem to have understood that they're going to spend their whole lives as artists. They're in a hurry because they feel that if they're not a success right out of the gate they're going to be a lifelong failure. I encourage you to think in a much longer arc, to take it easy and do it for the long haul - not to have a preconceived idea of what success is in relation to a durational framework. Some artists are successful early on, others later. Sometimes students also have misconceptions about what success is, mistaking the social aspects associated with success for actually making a successful artwork. To have a gallery, to have a big studio and to make money isn't necessarily to make good art. Don't confuse those two things.

• I encourage you to think more historically and consider what your contribution to art could be, not about what your art practice can bring you in terms of material things.

• I don't like to stand behind the camera or in front of the camera; I like to stand beside the camera. I figured out pretty early on - or I came up with the idea - that the camera is actually not the only agent involved in the production of meaning. There are also chemical designers, optical designers and industrial designers. There are economic and social issues. So I try to move around the photographic programme and occupy different positions at different times. Even though I didn't' get assignments in art school, I do treat myself like a commercial photographer: I give myself assignments. I become a product photographer, or I become a photojournalist, and I pick a subject as though it were a journalistic assignment.

Akademie-X, John Stezaker

[[akademie-X]], John Stezaker

Lesson 30: Art Education - A Contradiction in Terms, page 283

After years of involvement in art education, both as a student and as a teacher, I have arrived at the conviction that art education is a contradiction in terms. Picasso understood this when he said that he did not search but that he found. Art is finding and that is incalculable and unpredictable. There can be no preparation for it. No research is possible for it.

Education is ostensibly dedicated to knowledge. The best art comes out of not knowing - out of ignorance. Education professes to render the world either transparent or legible. Art seems always to be a confrontation with the opposite: the unknowable, the illegible.

.....I believe in the importance of seclusion and indolence in the creation of art. Art needs to find a space to hide. It thrives in dusty neglected atrophied spaces. In a sense, one could say it needs educational dysfunction: it needs neglect. How often have important developments in art come out of groups of students taking control of their own aesthetic agenda in the absence of a strong educational programme? Modern education, in attempting conscientiously to create a miniature version of the exhibiting world awaiting its prospective artists, inadvertently betrays the possibility of art, which as Maurice Blanchot insists, comes out of an 'exile from life'.

More practically, I would suggest following the example of Henry David Thoreau's economics of aesthetic reflection: find an undemanding job, occupying the minimum time commitment to support the maximum proportion of time dedicated to aesthetic indolence. Times have changed the balance of that economy since Thoreau's day. He only had to work one day a week for the farmer whose land he lived on in order to subsist in his exile from life. We live in a culture hostile to nonproductive activity, but it's precisely because of this that the resistance of aesthetic indolence is so vital.

DIALOGUES WITH MARCEL DUCHAMP by Pierre Cabanne

DIALOGUES WITH MARCEL DUCHAMP by Pierre Cabanne

Chapter 4. I Like Breathing Better than Working

Page 69

CABANNE: You have also said that the artist is unaware of the real significance of his work and that the spectator should always participate in supplementing the creation by interpreting it.

DUCHAMP: Exactly. Because I consider, in effect, that if someone, any genius, were living in the heart of Africa and doing extraorinary paintings every day, without anyone's seeing them, he wouldn't exist. To put it another way, the artist exists only if he is known. Consequently, one can envisage the existence of a hundred thousand geniuses who are suicides, who kill themselves, who diappear, because they didn't know what to do to make themselves known, to push themselves, and to become famous.

    I believe very strongly in the "medium" aspect of the artist. The artist makes something, then one day, he is recognized by the intervention of the public, of the spectator; so later he goes on to posterity. You can't stop that, because, in brief, it's a product of two poles - there's the pole of the one who makes the work, and the pole of the one who looks at it. I give the latter as much importance as the one who makes it.

   Naturally, no artist accepts this interpretation. But when you get right down to it, what is an artist? As much as the furniture maker, say Boulle, he's the man who owns a "Boulle." A work is also made of the admiration we bring to it.

  African wooden spoons were nothing at the time when they were made, they were simply funcational; later thye became beautiful things, "works of art".

  Don't you think the spectator's role is important?

AKADEMIE X LESSONS IN ART + LIFE - Tim Rollins

[[akademie-X]],[[Tim Rollins]]

• page 268 lesson 28: Art is Not Just Experience

• We believe good art is work that doesn't ask permission to exist, to be is enough. Good art is anything made sincerely yours. This art can be affirmative, shamelessly beautiful or ugly, a contribution of dissent, audacious and critical, yet deeply celebratory by the very fact of its existence. We think good art is always a gift, an affirmation of a mysterious gratitude. It's not instrumental but feels inevitable. Art is a faith proposition built upon a base of wonder.

AKADEMIE X LESSONS IN ART + LIFE - Wangechi Mutu

[[akademie-X]], [[Wangechi Mutu]]

• page 228, Lesson 24: Living Art

• The sharpening of visual intelligence is crucial for artists. I would recommend drawing - and by this, I don't mean drawing in a pedantic, high-school, instructional manner; I mean using your hand and your mind to pull out information from the subconscious onto a surface and into the real world. It is one of the best ways to shorten the distance between your brain and your fingertips and to allow you to gauge what is going on from within yourself. When you speed up that process, by drawing with as basic a material as pencil or charcoal, or ink and brush, your senses of intuition, honesty and integrity are sharpened. I would also push every artist to enhance their sense of context and their role as artist by visiting museums or the theatre, going to poetry readings, hanging out at DJ slams, listening to live bands - to participate in and enter cultural spaces in one way or another. Figuring out what's happening in other genres and media in your particular moment in time is important to you as a visual artist because even if you don't feel it's relevant to you, making cross-references makes you aware of your own position and place, your aliveness at that particular moment in time.

• Everyone should understand as much about the past as they can possibly get in their heads. As the voices of their culture and their communities, artists in particular should know as much as possible about what has happened prior to their own existence. It's a way to stand out as the voice of the present, to pay homage to what has happened, and avoid repeating and recycling the mistakes that have already been made. It's also a way to remain in touch with your own humanity, and with the humanity of others whom you don't know.

AKADEMIE X LESSONS IN ART + LIFE - lesson 26

TUTOR: Raqs Media Collective

Page 248

The Third Lesson: Time for Wine

The third lesson is about time. Sometimes, to learn this lesson, we have to prepare a feast - a feast with no food, but with a lot of wine and many notes. One of the forms this has taken is a symposium on time, which was first produced in the Wide Open School at the Hayward Gallery, London, in the summer of 2012. The form is simple and remains durable.

Fifteen or so participants sit in a large table, each with a plate and a wine glass in front of them. A set of carefully chosen notes on time printed on index cards appear on the plates, in the form of ‘courses’. Each ‘guest’ reads the ‘portion’ on his/her plate and everyone drinks, and after a round of readings (a course) the ‘table’ has a conversation. The idea is to let thinking, conversation and the requisite amount of wine do its job to add up to a stimulating consideration of time. Time itself is physically present. The cumulative, incremental effect of wine, factored through time, tranforms the experience into being enveloped inside a dilating fold. ‘Students’ cease to be students, and process elaborate theories. The reticent blossom into the loquacious, and the shy become bold. Once, at the end of the feast, people burst into song, and tears. Invariably, there has been laughter. The length of time this takes is a minimum of three hours, about the duration of a well-paced meal. As the courses gather momentum, an intensification of ideas and images, of associations and possibilities, takes hold, and we begin to get a grip on the qualia of time itself. We understand the relationship between, the presence of art. and the intensification of experience: of a different sense of time.

AKADEMIE X LESSONS IN ART + LIFE

AKADEMIE X LESSONS IN ART + LIFE

LESSON 23

TUTOR: Carrie Moyer

Page 220

Sharpen your visual intelligence by looking at art in person - Close looking is a means of gathering information in order to analyse a work of art within the parameters set by its maker. Through careful examination the object reveals its materials, size, scale; the processes and methods of its facture; the identity of the maker; its relationship to the history of the medium and genre as well as to the world at large. using this form of connoisseurship to decide if art is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ would defeat the purpose. It’s more like being a scientist and learning how to analyse and identify what you’re looking at.

Introduction by Robert Motherwell, page 10, Dialogs with Marcel Duchamp, Pierre Cabanne

An artist must be unusually intelligent in order to grasp simultaneously many structured relations. In fact, intelligence can be considered as the capacity to grasp complex relations; in this sense, Leonardo’s intelligence, for instance, is almost beyond belief. Duchamp’s intelligence contributed many things, of course, but for me its greatest accomplishment was to take him beyond the merely “aesthetic” concerns that face every “modern” artist - whose role is neither religious nor communal, but instead secular and individual. This problem has been called “the despair of the aesthetic:” if all colors or nudes are equally pleasing to the eye, why does the artist choose one color or figure rather than another? If he does not make a purely “aesthetic” choice, he must look for further criteria on which to base his value judgments. Kierkegaard held that artistic criteria were first the real of the aesthetic, then the ethical, then the realm of the holy. Duchamp, as a nonbeliever, could not have accepted holiness as a criterion but, in setting up for himself complex technical problems or new ways of expressing erotic subject matter, for instance, he did find an ethic beyond the “aesthetic” for his ultimate choices. And his most successful works, paradoxically, take on that indirect beauty achieved only by those artists who have been concerned with more than the merely sensuous. In this way, Duchamp’s intelligence accomplished nearly everything possible within the reach of a modern artist, earning him the unlimited and fully justified respect of successive small groups of admirers throughout his life. But, as he often says in the following pages, it is posterity who will judge, and he, like Stendhal, had more faith in posterity than in his contemporaries. At the same time, one learns from his conversations of an extraordinary artistic adventure, filled with direction, discipline, and disdain for art as a trade and for the repetition of what has already been done. 

AKADEMIE X LESSONS IN ART + LIFE - TUTOR: THOMAS LAWSON

AKADEMIE X LESSONS IN ART + LIFE

LESSON 19

TUTOR: Thomas Lawson

Page 178

Artists notice stuff - the way things come together or fall apart, the telling detail or overlooked ruin, the tell-tale gesture. To be an artist, you have to train yourself to pay attention to the world in which you live, constantly looking for clues, always aware of your surroundings. Make notes, try observational drawing or taking photographs, study how things are made. There is no one method here. The task is to find a way to notice the details that make sense to you, the details that will open your eyes to content.

AKADEMIE X LESSONS IN ART + LIFE - TUTOR: Chris Kraus

AKADEMIE X LESSONS IN ART + LIFE

LESSON 18

TUTOR: Chris Kraus

Page 170

Whereas modernism believed that the artist’s life held all the magic keys to reading works of art, neo-conceptualism has cooled this off and corporatized it. The artist’s own biography doesn’t matter much at all. What life? The blanker the better. The life experience of the artist, if channeled into the artwork, can only impede art’s neo-corporate, neo-Conceptual purpose. It is the biography of the institution that we want to read. 

Reviewing dOCUMENTA (13) in New York Magazine, Jerry Saltz coins the term ‘Post Art’ to describe work that ‘doesn’t even see art as separate from living…things that aren’t artworks so much as they are about the drive to make things that, like ar, embed imagination in material and grasp that creativity is a cosmic force…A chemist or a general may be making Post Art every day at the office.”

From Academic Emulation toward Romantic Originality

History of Modern Art, seventh edition, H.H. Arnason Elizabeth C. Mansfield, Chapter 1, page 4

The emphasis on emulation as opposed to novelty begun to lose ground toward the end of the eighteenth century when a new weight was given to artistic invention. Increasingly, invention was linked with imagination, that is to say, with the artist’s unique vision, a vision unconstrained by academic practice and freed from the pictorial conventions that had been obeyed since the Renaissance. This new attitude underlies the aesthetic interests of Romanticism. Arising in the last years of the eighteenth century and exerting its influence well into the nineteenth, Romanticism exalted humanity's capacity for emotion. In music, literature, and the visual arts, Romanticism is typified by an insistence on subjectivity and novelty. Today, few would argue that art is the simply the consequence of creative genius. Romantic artists and theorists, however, understood art to be the expression of and individual’s will to create rather than a product of particular cultural as well as personal values. Genius, for the Romantics, was something possessed innately by the artist: It could not be learned or acquired. To express genius, then, the Romantic artist had to resist academic emulation and instead turn inward, toward making pure imagination visible. The British painter and printmaker William Blake (1757-1827) typifies this approach to creativity.

Akademie X: Lessons in Art + Life

from AKADEMIE X - LESSONS IN ART + LIFE

Tutor: Katharina Grosse
Lesson: The Artist as a Link Among other Links

• how I see the world: I do not see borders - not between foreground or background, nor between the visible and the invisible. I do not perceive the world through its recognizable forms, but through its possible appearances. I see the world as it is - as illusion.

• I realized that thinking is performative and therefore thoughts project space. I change the world by thinking about it in different ways and by giving space to these thoughts. Therefore I can actively create past, present and future and let them happen at the same time.

Akademie X: Lessons in Art + Life

Tutor: Dan Graham

Lesson: Art Schools at Their Best and Worst

BEST

1. Visiting artists: Lectures and studio visits

2. Class trips.

3. Availability of video, film and audio equipment with technicians

4. Practical training in areas such as graphic design.

5. Good libraries

WORST

1. The emphasis, since the 1980s, on making art as a specialist professional ‘career’ rather than as a passionate experiment.

2. The obsession with the artist as a future ‘art star’.

3. The obsession with making an academic rationale for art, a good example being the overuse of the world ‘problematize’.

4. Teaching only the contemporary art that is found in the art magazines in the library.

Lesson: LOVER LETTER from us - Tutor: Olafur Eliasson

AKADEMIE X LESSONS IN ART + LIFE, lesson 8 - PHAIDON

…We don’t pronounce ahead of time what we think we need to know. After we do something we don’t say others should do that thing. We try to learn how to learn, so we learn where we have to go by going. We evaluate and critique ourselves along the way, and together, and always, and all ways. We invite other artists and practitioners to think and do with us. We believe in risking vulnerability and practicing in the robust discomfort of uncertainty. A shared vulnerability is important. We believe in getting out of our comfort one. We believe in an economy of effort. Of making an effort. In rejections that offer alternatives. We believe in thinking and doing, in the active imagination as an agent in the world, in shaping and being shaped by the world, in causing the world to wobble differently depending where we stand. We like the world wobbling differently.

School is not a place for a safe enclosure of lessons. School is an amplifier for the world. Lessons are not fixed ahead of time or they become rules. Dogmatic. Concrete. Belaboured. The syllabus is written after the course ends. The course is endless. The curriculum emerges out of the energy and relationships in the space and the world. It emerges out of the encounters in the world. It emerges out of the social contracts for how we negotiate and engage with each other in the world. It emerges out of questions and feelings, empathy, the politics of experimentation, perceptual awareness, the responsibility of taking risks and compassion.

A philosophy of care. It emerges out of the ecology of thoughts and ideas, being conscious that we are conscious and the felt feeling of being present. It emerges out of the question: how can art change the world?

Our school emerges out of questions of why: why make a specific artwork? Why do something one way and not the other? Why put a work in an institution? What relationships does a work empower? How does a work allow us to understand and feel the conditions and constraints through which systems squeeze the world into different forms, so that what works can touch the world? Finding our ‘whys’ helps us to prioritize content, helps us sharpen a precision with tools. Sharpening our tools helps us to collaborate with others and builds openness. Simply breathing can provide the material for a workshop. Simply breathing can be a lesson plan. Breath now. Take a deep breath. Simply breathing can help us feel an awareness of where we are and what we are doing. A pause. Break. Caesura. Everyone participating shapes the lesson, makes the lesson more, makes the lesson on.

Examples of thinking doing:

1) Go outside with the group. Walk backwards for fifteen minutes through the city. Note the change in speeds. Note what changes in who approaches.

.

4) With a group stand in a circle in public space. Laugh out loud for five minutes. If you have to, fake the laughter until you make it happen on its own.

.

11) As a group, walk very, very, very, very slowly for fifteen minutes in public. Very slowly. Like you are in slow motion. Like you are conscious of every bend and muscle. Like the air is a thick viscous plasma of breath. Feel your weight on the ground. Feel the ground pushing up against you. Feel your balance shift to imbalance. Cultivate that cusp of balance and control. Cultivate the carp out of it. Feel each part of the slow motion as it is distributed through your entire body. Don’t forget to breathe.

How to be an Artist, by Jerry Saltz, #32 Art as a Verb, Zettel 162

In the past two hundred years or so, art has been treated as something we look at in clean, white, well-lit galleries and museums. It’s been made to seem passive: another tourist attraction to take a picture in front of before your move on. For most of its entire history though, art has been active: something that does thing to, or for us, that makes things happen. Holy relics in churches all over the world are said to heal. -

The Story of Art, E.H. Gombrich, page 577, Zettel 161

Picasso himself denied that he was making experiments. He said he did not search, he found. He mocked at those who wanted to understand his art. ‘Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird?’ Of course, he was right. No painting can be fully ‘explained’ in words. But words are sometimes useful pointers, they help to clear away misunderstandings and can give us at least an inkling of the situation in which the artist finds himself. I believe that the situation which led Picasso to his different ‘finds’ is very typical of twentieth-century art. -

The Story of Art, E.H. Gombrich, page 564, Zettel 160

What upset the public about Expressionist art was, perhaps, not so much the fact that nature had been distorted as that the result led away from beauty…But the men who claimed to be serious artists should forget that if they must change the appearance of things they should idealize them rather than make them ugly was strongly resented. But (Edvard) Munch might have retorted that a shout of anguish is not beautiful, and that it would be insincere to look only at the pleasing side of life. For the Expressionists felt so strongly about human suffering, poverty, violence and passion, that they were inclined to think that the insistence on harmony and beauty in art was only born out of a refusal to be honest. The art of the classical masters, of a Raphael or Correggio, seemed to them insincere and hypocritical. They wanted to face the stark facts of our existence and to express their compassion for the disinherited and the ugly. It became almost a point of honour with them to avoid anything which smelt of prettiness and polish, and to shock the ‘bougeois‘ out of his real or imagined complacency. -