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January 17, 2009
I'm currently reading a chapter in W.J.T. Mitchell's Picture Theory on abstraction. In it he argues that the modernist account of abstraction is one that highlights that abstract art was a repression of literature, or language, in favour of the pure visuality or painterly form.
Abstract art aimed to place a barrier between itself and literature.Thus Clement Greenberg argued that the abstract artist is a purist who insists on excluding literature and subject matter from art. The primary aim was the erection of a wall between the visual arts and those of literature, whilst the overcoming of representation of content was secondary consideration. Modernism is a rupture of the ut pictura poesis (word + picture) tradition.
The image refers to a palimpsest or manuscript (typically of papyrus or parchment) that has been written on more than once, with the earlier writing incompletely erased and often legible.The picture and text tradition is what Mitchell calls the image/text and it's history has been marked by those who place the emphasis on text at the expense of images, and conversely those who place the emphasis on images at the expense of text.
The historical relation between text and picture is that of inter-action in the form a contest, with modernist painting anxious to shed paintings reliance on literature and turn attention to the problems of its medium. Painting in the form of pictorial abstraction was to be the dominant art of industrial civilization. Kitsch was art that had not announced its reliance on literature (social realism and Hollywood).
Postmodernism represents the explosive breakdown in the barrier between visual image and language maintained by the modernists.
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Michael Fried would have a similar position to Greenberg, as he held that modernist art that art was threatened by the forces of theatricality, entertainment, kitsch and mass-culture. The key text is Art and Objecthood.
The linchpin of Fried’s account is theatricality and its antithesis, absorption. In his usage of these terms, if a work acknowledges, addresses, or otherwise includes the beholder, it’s theatrical; if it’s self-contained and self-sufficient, it’s absorbed. The paramount aim of modernist painting in the 1960s, according to him, was to defeat theater.