CCS 2005-2006 Mini-programme 1 DR KEN NEIL PHILOSOPHY IN MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART

CCS 2005-2006Stages 2 and 3

Philosophy in Modern and Contemporary Art

Lecture Three Monday 17th Oct

CCS 2005-2006

Mini-programme 1

DR KEN NEIL

PHILOSOPHY IN

MODERN AND

CONTEMPORARY ART

PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS OF CONTEMPORANEITY SEEN AND EMBODIED IN ART




TODAY’S FOUR SECTIONS:

1. Baudelaire and the authentic moment.

2. Danto and historical contemporary art.

3. When is now?

4. Embodying the now and enacting the contemporary.




1

Charles Baudelaire 1821-1867

Baudelaire, the great poet translator and critic, is for many one of the most prescient authors of Modernity.

His poetry and criticism seemed to capture the spirit of the modern age, and looked forward perceptively to 20thC culture.




1

For Baudelaire - the artist had to be ‘of his own times’ before he could legitimately claim to be a Modern artist.

It was a mistake, he said, for the artist to look to antecedents within the history of art if one wanted to paint aspects of the present.

“Woe to him who studies the antique for anything else other than pure art, logic and general method! By steeping himself too thoroughly in it, he will lose all memory of the present; he will renounce the rights and privileges offered by circumstance - for almost all our originality comes from the seal which Time imprints on our sensations.”




Edgar Degas L’Absinthe 1876




Umberto Boccioni The City Rises 1910




Constantin Guys Equipage in the Park Late19thC




1

“Be very sure that this man Constantin Guys, this solitary, gifted with an active imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great human desert - has an aim loftier than that of a mere flaneur, an aim more general, something other than the fugitive pleasure of circumstance.

He is looking for that quality which you must allow me to call ‘modernity’. He makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distil the eternal from the transitory.”

“By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugutive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable”.




1

Modernity, for Baudelaire, was all about the spirit of the then contemporary age. To be a Modern artist one had to keenly observe and generate work from the wonderful sights and sounds of the immediate world.

The authentic Modern artist does not seek to move outwith the time in which he finds himself.

1

Baudelaire’s Modern art is forward looking and positivist - it assumes responsibility for pushing art into new, uncharted futures, apprehending the eternal from the transitory as it proceeds.




1

•In a sense, despite the distinctions which Baudelaire draws between art and technology, Modern art as he described it might be compared, for the sake of argument, to the Davey Lamp.

•Progress requires invention and innovation to meet the challenges and hurdles set down by the developing Modern world.

•So - George Davey’s lamp addresses the Modern problem of fire-damp explosions and Umberto Boccioni’s Futurist painting addresses the problem of depicting the multiplicity which characterised the Modern age.

•Both examples take for granted a progressive role for technology and art, even if one practice is seen as loftier than the other.

•In other words, both examples of Modern practice assume that the past, that is - discipline precedents, are there to be triumphed over, surpassed, as the respective disciplines move forward into subsequent Modernities, wherein the same process takes place.




2

Arthur Danto (and the German theorist Hans Belting) put forward arguments (in the 1980s) to suggest, however, that Modern art, as described by Baudelaire and others, is different across time from Contemporary art.

This might mean that, Boccioni’s Modern art for example or the work of Constantin Guys, although obviously once upon a time contemporary, should not be seen as Contemporary as we might understand that term now after having read Danto and Belting.

Why so?




2

“Contemporary art has no brief against the art of the past, no sense that the art of the past is something from which liberation must be won.

It is part of what defines Contemporary art that the art of the past is available for such use as artists care to give it.”

Danto




Umberto Boccioni ‘Elasticity’ 1912

2

Boccioni, practicing authentic Modernist philosophy, saw the art forms of the immediate past as forms from which the present, dynamic, contemporary (with a small ‘c’) artists must liberate themselves.

In short, he exercised himself over producing artworks which spoke to a Baudelairean philosophy of the unfolding progression of art, both in terms of its forms and in terms of what it paid attention to.




2

Contemporary for Danto requires the artist to break

free from the antagonism towards the artistic forms

of the past, something which Boccioni did not do.

In breaking free, the Contemporary artist also breaks

free from the idea that the present is destined to be

better than the past - which is our myth of the Davey

lamp, a myth which excludes questions of true value.




2

Jasper Johns Perilous Night 1982

Jasper Johns’s work, for example, is frequently constructed by ‘present pasts’ - and resembles Danto’s conception of Contemporary. It embraces a post-historicity.




Edouard Manet Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe 1863

2

But Danto’s idea of the Contemporary, logically, can also be seen in examples of historical art.

Manet here famously incorporated a composition from a painting by Raphael as seen through an etching by Marcantonio Raimondi.




2

Gavin Turk here famously appears as Sid Vicious, dressed as Elvis as seen through a screenprint by Andy Warhol.

Gavin Turk Pop 1993

Warhol Elvis 1963




3

When is now?

Now is of course now (I think) but now involves then, and it is the attitude towards the ‘then’ that Danto concerns himself with.

And perhaps our Contemporary attitude to ‘then’ has resulted in a superficial and spectacular version of culture, progress and development has been forgotten and style and posturing has taken the place of positivist art making?




4

So - Danto sets out a difference between capturing the contemporary spirit of the age of this ‘now’ (which is akin to Baudelaire’s Modernity) and producing artwork which is actually Contemporary.

This might be summarised by saying that there is a difference between

embodying the now and enacting the contemporary.




4

Ralph Goings, an American

Photorealist painter, can be seen

to be an artist who embodies the

now, utilising new departures in

painterly technique in the process

- not unlike Degas and Guys.




4

Perhaps Tracey Emin can be seen to

be an artist who enacts the

Contemporary, by being an artist

whose styles are historical and

contemporary (with a small ‘c’); she

does not seek to take art beyond the

past into its new future, like a Guys or

a Boccioni, in fact, she darkly revels

in the past as if to make the very

point that her present moment is

constantly wrestling with the past,

and the two elements are made

visible as part of that struggle.




4

Tracey Emin Just Remember How It Was 1998




Boccioni Fusion of Head and Window 1912

Chapman Brothers Insult to Injury 2003

Last word to:

The Discursive Frame

Documents

CCS 2005-2006 Mini-programme 1 DR KEN NEIL PHILOSOPHY IN MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART