MODERNISM IN ART: AN

INTRODUCTIONReflections of a Modern World

(An Introduction to some key thinkers)

Last Week – The Gallery

For Max and Benjamin please go to: http://www.slideshare.net/DeborahJ/reflections-of-a-modern-world-an-introduction-to-some-key-thinkers

Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968)

“In the history of modern art history, the primary ‘event’ is undoubtedly the work of Erwin Panofsky” (Holly 1984, p.10.)

Ekphrasis

Key questions for Art Historians

Can artworks be judged objectively? How much can we understand about a

time period by looking at individual works of art?

What methods should we use when studying art?

Francis Picabia (1921) The Cacodylic Eye

Iconology1. Primary or Natural Subject Matter (Pre-Iconographic): The most basic

level of understanding, this stratum consists of perception of the work’s pure form. (For example, The Last Supper. If we stopped at this first stratum, such a picture could only be perceived as a painting of 13 men seated at a table. This first level is the most basic understanding of a work, devoid of any added cultural knowledge.)

2. Secondary or Conventional subject matter (Iconography): This stratum goes a step further and brings to the equation cultural knowledge. (For example, a western viewer would understand that the painting of 13 men around a table would represent The Last Supper. Similarly, seeing a representation of a haloed man with a lion could be interpreted as a depiction of St. Jerome.)

3. Tertiary or Intrinsic Meaning or Content (Iconology): This level takes into account personal, technical, and cultural history into the understanding of a work. It looks at art not as an isolated incident, but as the product of a historical environment. (“Why did the artist choose to represent The Last Supper in this way?” or “Why was St. Jerome such an important saint to the patron of this work?”)

Edited from Wikipedia text at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Panofsky .

Most art history prior to Panofsky focused on formal developments. In other words, art was thought about in relation to a particular style. Panofsky’s achievement was to shift attention to content and meaning.

Although Iconology doesn’t guarantee objectivity, Panofsky himself admitted that the deeper meaning could be imposed by the theorist and tried to add his own “correctives” (checks against source material of the time), it does open individual artworks to discussions of broader cultural influences.

Panofsky paved the way for Semiotics, a treatment of images as a language. Semiotic would break down images in to signs and symbols, considering the cultural conditions that allow them to mean something specific in a certain time and place.

The Cultural Turn describes a range of academic movements related to postmodernism that argue that no meaning exists independently of a culture. Could Les Demoiselles d’Avignon have been produced at any other time or place?

Panofsky references Ferretti, Silvia (1989) Cassier, Panofsky +

Warburg. USA, Yale University. Holly, Michael Ann (1984) Panofsky and the

Foundations of Art History. London, Cornell University Press.

Murray, Chris (2003) Key Writers on Art: The Twentieth Century. London, Routledge.

Panofsky, Erwin (1972 [1939]) Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance. USA, Icon.

Panofsky, Erwin (1955) Meaning in the Visual Arts. New York, Doubleday Anchor Books.

Theodor Adorno (1903-1967)

Frankfurt SchoolThe Frankfurt School refers to a group of very influential thinkers who pursued a critical re-evaluation of Marxism, primary attached to the Institute or Social Research and the University of Frankfurt. Its members include Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm and Theodor Adorno. Later Adorno’s student Jurgen Harbermas would become very influential and direct the school. Also associated with the school was Walter Benjamin.

On Marx:Adorno used some of the ideas refined in Marx’s work, such as the division of labour. Marx suggested that social division of labour – divisions between different groups of people as part of social control and exploitation – was often ideologically hidden under the guise of technical division of labour – certain people have to do certain things because that’s where their skills lie. Although Adorno’s writing can suggest that he was more supportive of Autonomous Art (High Art) over popular culture he still stove to understand the underlying social and economic basis for them.

Like many thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School, Adorno did not subscribe to the Marxian Grand Narrative that capitalism is a step on the way to greater liberation. In fact, rather than seeing the Bourgeois loosing their grip, Adorno thought that the ‘Culture Industry’ was extending social control and people’s passivity.

Social Control

Adorno’s father was of Jewish decent and when the Nazi’s came to power he, like all other Jewish professors, had to give up his teaching position. He moved to Oxford, USA, in 1933. (He would return to Frankfurt in 1949.)

Anti-Semitism became a model for how Adorno felt authority operated in all cases. Regimes strive for universal control and in so doing exaggerate differences between people to an alarming degree, seeking to remove anything that is taken to be ‘other’. Studying the anti Jewish propaganda of the time Adorno saw that authority extended its power by appealing to subliminal appetites, the unthinking mind, and were often Illogical and incoherent on the surface.

For Adorno, Fascism was a key example of the development of the modern world, not a freak occurrence.

The Culture Industry

Because of his believe in the Authoritarian nature of the Culture Industry Adorno fundamentally disagreed with Benjamin's optimism in Mechanical Reproduction. Far from dissipating the aura of Art works, Adorno felt that mass-reproduction in fact extended the universalising tendency of Capitalism.

Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) – written with Max Horkheimer

“No Universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb. It ends in the total menace which organised mankind poses to organized men...”

(Adorno quoted in Bernstein, Adorno 2004)

Art?“Art [for Adorno] is the emphatic assertion of what is excluded from Enlightenments‘ instrumental rationality: the claim of sensuous particularity and rational ends.” (Ibid. P.5)

Autonomous Art, as opposed to the culture industry, should be, in Adorno’s formulation, that which resuscitates a critical awareness in viewers. Adorno recognised that Autonomous Art was still part of society, i.e. Not truly autonomous and related economically to labour, but felt it still occupied a special position that nevertheless allowed it to comment on society.

Adorno’s work was very much based around philosophical principles, which is why it is hard to use specific examples of visual art from his own writing. As a musician and frequent music critic he was an admirer of Schoenberg, and in fact strove to find a kind of atonal-critical-writing equivalent (making his writing hard to read). However, he seemed to support Modern Art in general, seeing it as fulfilling it’s duty to break the passivity of popular culture. This has led some postmodern critics to see him as being Elitist like Clement Greenberg, but perhaps read more carefully it actually pre-empts many postmodern concerns.

Adorno references: Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer (1997 [1944]) Dialectic of

Enlightenment. London, Verso. Adorno, Theodor (1998) The Stars down to Earth. London

Routledge. Adorno, Theodor (2001 [1988]) The Culture Industry. New York,

Routledge. Benjamin, Andrew (ed.) The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and

Benjamin. London, Routledge Jarvis, Simon (2002) Adorno: A Critical Inroduction. Cambridge,

Polity. Murray, Chris (2003) Key Writers on Art: The Twentieth Century.

London, Routledge. Zuidervaart, Lambert (1994) Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. London,

MIT Press.

Reading:

Theodor Adorno: Available at: http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-ador.htm