Theory Flashcards
Problem in the relation between art and psychoanalysis?
Eitehr to connection between the psyche and art work is too direct or immediate and as a result the specificty of the work of art is lost, or it is too conscious or calculated, as though the pscyhe could simply be illustrated by the work (problems of mediation and causaton)
Bataille - concept of “alteration”
– used by Bataille to describe the primal impulse of man’s self-representation thus becomes a concept that simultaneously leads downward and upward: evolution and devolution; like altus and sacer, the double-directed, primal concepts that interest Freud.
Similar logic to confounding terms like high and low, base or sacred, are polar opposites, : idea that violence has historically been lodged at the heart of the sacred, that to be genuine the thought of the creative must be s simultaneously an experience of death.
EX: Idea that the Aztecs have an incredible city and vibrant culture founded on ritual of human sacrifice.
Benjamin,“Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,”
Benjamin maintained that praise for the antiquated was one of the essential features of Surrealism. In 1929 article he characterizes this backward-looking gaze as one of the “surprising discoveries” of the group. Reveal “revolutionary energies” in the “outmoded”. While Balzac was the first to speak of the ruins of the Bourgeoisie, Benjamin says Surrealists were the first to provide an overview of those ruins.
Élan vital
Bergson, Creative Evolution, 1907
“vital impetus” or “vital force”
- Explanation for evolution and development of organisms, which Bergson linked closely with consciousness - with the intuitive perception of experience and the flow of inner time
- Not dissimilar to Schopenhauer’s concept of the will-to-live
Dali, Gasch, Montana, Manifest Groc: Yellow Manifesto, 1927/28
Never published. Critic’s reservations, mailed to members of Catalan intelligentsia. Diffusion of anti-artistic art, detailed list of machinist world of cinema, jazz, automobile, engineering, ocean liners etc… Less a negation of art than positive contemplation of world produced by new tools and technical advances. Shun hand and subjectivity of individual.
- Purpose: expose just how far Catalan lagged behind the modern world.
- State that Catalan avant-garde ought to be considered non-existent. Reaction also against return to order which had purified in developed European countries and thus strengthened the avant-garde, while in Catalonia it only prompted regression to the confines of reactionary painting. In short, claim world is moving in one direction and Catalonia in another. It resonates.
What was the significance of Vermeer to Dalí?
Artist who de-anthropomorphized the gaze and same time attain unwonted level of intensity. Perfect model for realization of new “poetic facts” that had to be objective, precise, and sterilized, while at the same time terrifying, surprising and mysterious.
Dali By 1928 : lectures about approaching reality through “instinct” and “intuition” – move away from perception but also from rationality of the “idea”, the artist like scientist, does not simply eschew the real world but rather approaches it in another way
(Again, ex. Vermeer whose machine-like gaze intensifies ways of seeing, enabling him to break away from perception and to attain poetic inspiration. Also refers to Freud here.
-Like nature, artist takes pains to conceal his handiwork. But the mimesis, the photographic manner of painting, is placed in doubt of and by itself: Within out setting similitude aside, Dali empties these elements of reality, even of their identity by means of a process that enables him to represent something that may at the same time represent something else.
Differences: Dada vs Surrealism
_Transfiguration of audience relationship_s – Dada initiates new form of spectatorship. Its work is useless for contemplation (Benjamin reminds us this was historically rooted in theology).. Caberet Voltaire in Zurich – teasing and provoking audience.
Fundamental distinction from Surrealism: latter more closely tied with culture of poetry and the book, more focused on individual unconscious detached from larger social one, issues of public and politics, mass communication and audience relationships not at center. Dada’s relationship with the public sphere is defining. Refusal to enforce a collective moral code as dividing line. Dada has no clear theory, but we can say with certainty that it took shape within crucible of modern crisis in the notion of the public sphere: profound skepticism about all governing social systems: law, education, language, and a collapse in faith in the possibility of a cohesive public. Discomfort with modern forms of collectivity, nostalgia for older forms of community based in traditional religious structures often appears; conversely often resurrects ritual in fragmentary and transfigured ways. Loss of community, rather than its non-existence, that haunts data.
Differences: Picasso vs Braque
- Greenberg sets up internal compettion betweenthe two artists
- Greater concern for transparency n Braque and denser, more tactile quality of Picasso
Dubuffet, Anticultural positions, Lecture. 1951
Claim that primitive values such as ‘instinct, passion, caprice, violence, madness, were very much alive on the streets in the West but were not reflected in contemporary culture, which he saw as an ill fitting coat speaking a dead language
- Reason and logic as routes to knowledge in the primitive
- Ridicule Wester notions of beauty and scorn written word as inferior means of communication
- Assert importance of delirium in making art, explain that art should go to the roots of mental activity,
Dubuffet, in Notes for the Well-Read, 1945
- Begin to explain what he understood as an active and expressive role for materials in artt, a role that was crucial in the evolution of his radical theory and practice of art brut
- Argue that art should be the product of a competitive interaction between the artist, his tools, and his medium, and that the finished work should retain the marks of that struggle
- Favour difficult, intractable materials because they heighten the adventure for the artists an introduce the element of chance,
Exhibition of Surrealist objects, 1936
Glass cabinets suggest ethnographic museum, primitive masks were juxtaposed with work by Picasso with Surrealist objects, such as Giacometti’s Suspended Ball , ready-mades by Duchamp, Oppenheim’s object . Include mathematical objects as well – idea that rationalist opposition between scientific and poetic objects was redundant. Didn’t just value what industrial/rational tried to repress, the point was to destabilize established divisions and categories rather than to promote universal and absolute ones.
MoMA, Cubism and Abstract Art, 1936
Production of “classic text” of interpretation, discernable shift in discussion and display of modern art and its history.
Technical Radicalism is emphasized – (chronological display of progressive abandonment of attempts to imitate natural appearance and disengagement from “descriptive” functions which leaves the “language” of artistic representation concerned with expressive possibilities of “pictorial configurations” of colour, line and shape.
- Consistent with Roger Fry’s privileging, 1909, in disinterested contemplation
- Greenberg’s notion of modern specialization in production and the ‘authentic’ reception of modern works of art
- Assumption of language which reaches a state of “purity” through self-criticism
In this view, technical and expressive potential of the formal elements of modern art are the most significant measure of their functions as representations.
BUT: Meyer Schapiro’s critique of Barr’s catalogue: “The logical opposition of realistic and abstract art by which Barr explains the more recent change rests on two assumptions about the nature of painting, common in writing on abstract art – that representation is a passive mirroring of things and therefore essentially non-artistic, and that abstract art, on the other hand, is a purely aesthetic activity, unconditioned by objects and based on its own eternal laws…these views are thoroughly one sided and rest on a mistaken idea of what a representation is. There is no passive, ‘photographic’ representation in the sense described…All rendering of objects, no matter how exact they seem, even photographs, proceed from values, methods and viewpoints which somehow shape the image and often determine its contents (100)
Freud, Dreamwork
For Freud, dreams are the compromise between a wish and repression. This compromise is negotiated by the dream-work, which disguises the wish in order to fool further repression, through condensation of some of its aspects and displacement of others.
Freud’s Fetishism, 1927
- “The fetish is a substitute for the penis…for a particular and quite special penis that had been extremely important in early childhood but had later been lost.”
- In refusing to see his mother’s lack of penis, the boy disavows what he sees, resulting in both a belief and a non-belief in the woman’s phallus. This compromise (produced by the conflict between perception and the counter-wish) results in a substitute (the fetish).
- “It remains a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it.”
Id, Ego, Super-ego
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920 essay
Later elaborated upon The Ego and the ID.
- Theoretical constructs in terms of whose activity and interaction our mental life is described
Id - is the set of uncoordinated instinctual trends; source of bodily needs, wants desires, impulses. Innate at birth.
Super-ego - plays the critical and moralizing role; (keeps Id in check). Reflects cultural rules, mainly taught by parents. Airms for protection,. Internalization of the father figure, tends to stand in oppositionto desire of the id due to conflicting objectives.
Ego - is the organized, realistic part that mediates between the desires. Seeks to please the Id in realistic ways that will benefit long term. Cloak unconsciuos commands of the id with its own rationalizations. Enable indiidual to delay gratifying immediate needs and function effectively in the real world.
