Modern Art: Practices & Debates
Open University Course A316:- Modern Art: Practices & Debates, 1995 'It quickly emerged that the proper and unique area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique to the nature of its medium. The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thereby each art would be rendered 'pure ', and in its 'purify ' find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence. 'Purity ' meant self-definition, and the enterprise of self-criticism in the arts became one of self-definition, with a vengeance. '
(Greenberg, 'Modernist Painting ', Art in Theory, p.755) 'Greenberg 's aesthetics are the terminal point of [an] historical trajectory. There is another history of art, however, a history of representations ... for me, and some other erstwhile conceptualists, conceptual art opened onto that other history, a history which opens onto history. Art practice was no longer to be defined as an artisanal activity, a process of crafting fine objects in a given medium, it was rather to be seen as a set of operations performed in a field of signifying practices, perhaps centred on a medium but certainly not bounded by it '.
(Victor Burgin, 'The absence of presence ', Art in Theory, pp. 1098-9)
Discuss the merits of Burgin 's statement as a basis on which to distinguish postmodernism from Modernism in the practice of art. In your answer you should make reference to at least four works which you consider to be of particular relevance to an argument between these two positions.
This question highlights one of the themes central to the account of modem art offered in this course: the tension between the theoretical perspectives of, on the one hand, Modernist criticism and, on the other, an approach focused on the relationship of the art of any given period to its social, political and historical context. The two
(Greenberg, 'Modernist Painting ', Art in Theory, p.755) 'Greenberg 's aesthetics are the terminal point of [an] historical trajectory. There is another history of art, however, a history of representations ... for me, and some other erstwhile conceptualists, conceptual art opened onto that other history, a history which opens onto history. Art practice was no longer to be defined as an artisanal activity, a process of crafting fine objects in a given medium, it was rather to be seen as a set of operations performed in a field of signifying practices, perhaps centred on a medium but certainly not bounded by it '.
(Victor Burgin, 'The absence of presence ', Art in Theory, pp. 1098-9)
Discuss the merits of Burgin 's statement as a basis on which to distinguish postmodernism from Modernism in the practice of art. In your answer you should make reference to at least four works which you consider to be of particular relevance to an argument between these two positions.
This question highlights one of the themes central to the account of modem art offered in this course: the tension between the theoretical perspectives of, on the one hand, Modernist criticism and, on the other, an approach focused on the relationship of the art of any given period to its social, political and historical context. The two
Bibliography: Wood, Frascina, Harris, Harrison, Modernism in Dispute: Art since the Forties, Chapters 2 and 3, and associated A316 materials. Harrison & Wood (eds), Art in Theory, 1900 - 1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Blackwell, 1994 Frascina & Harris (eds), Art in Modern Culture: An anthology of critical texts, Phaidon, 1992 O 'Brian (ed), Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volumes 2 & 3, University of Chicago Press, 1986, 1993