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A BRIEF UNDERSTANDING OF ART
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Dated: 26/05/2009
Provided by:
PAT BULLEN-
www.patbullenwhatlinggallery.co.uk
Postmodernism is a movement, like (and unlike) any other movement in art and society that has come before. At the genesis of 'organised' art art itself was seen as a tool to publicise the grand narratives of religion and power and so reinforce the hyperrealities that formed the structures and societies of the day.
In the time of the Renaissance we see artists and the society they represented emerge from the earlier iconic art movements. They were striving for truth and naturalism, driving home the twin grand narratives of religion and power and building a powerful hyperreality in the process.
Their work and outlook eventually led to the age of Enlightenment, a weakening of the hyperrealities that had come before and the establishment of new ones. Absolute reliance on religious texts and Papal Infallibility was switched to the grand narratives of Science, that with its empirical methods, promised access to absolute truths.
Art, freed from its religious straitjacket, took a new turn and Romanticism flourished. The hopes and dreams, aspirations and pleasures of the human body and mind were explored and artistic techniques were developed to better describe them. The Impressionists, challenged by the new, cheap and easily reproducible photographic images worked, not to exactly describe the scene they witnessed but to describe what it felt like for a human to see them. Picasso went a stage further and tried to illustrate what it would be like to see an object from many places at once (for example) – but these great and innocent experiments were halted by the horror of the First World War and by Dadaism which rose up to confront it.
Up until that point each art movement had striven to construct and develop ideas, to adhere to its grand narrative, to support the hyperreality of its day. Dadaism, by contrast, strove only to deconstruct, to pull apart all that it saw as leading society to that point of destruction. Dadaism stood for nothing that adhered to any grand narrative, it pulled down, pulled apart the romantic ideals of giving up one's life for one's country, of the idea that the efforts of Science would lead to a new and enlightened, more humane and moral world and that people could be 'bettered' in this latest hyperreality.
Dadaism was crucially important for releasing – or unleashing – automatism, a junking of all traditional rules of art in favour of chance as the direct creative access to the unconscious.(1)
But Dada was short lived, it had to be, in its intensely political stance that art should be apolitical it could build nothing because it was basically nihilistic and dedicated to pulling apart every theory, even its own. But it cleared the ground and gave a clean space for the future of art and out of the clearing grew Surrealism.
The Surrealists were led to explore the unconscious and dream to advocate recourse to childlike spontaneity and supernatural powers, to claim for themselves the fascinations of the marvellous, the mysteries of primitive magic and ancient esoteric ritual. In so doing, they gave substance to the profound spiritual aspirations so long constrained by reason, withered by intellect and imprisoned by the subtly woven mesh of culture . . . To propose as a model the virtues of a child’s or primitive’s sensibility and then to try to ape one or the other when one is a civilised adult is a contradiction which may well stimulate a writer but which condemns a painter to contrived affectation. So it was that Surrealism was advantageous to poetry but precipitated painting into the dead end of a new academicism.(2)
Surrealism did however build the foundations of modern art by freeing it from the constraints of previous grand narratives.
