Dr John CrossleyHSFC FOUNDATION SEMINAR

#7

Week 7 - Author as Producer

Walter Bejamin - Selected writings 1931-34

Benjamin argued that artists and writers should always be part of the revolutionary

struggle to overthrow the forces of reactionary capitalism and fascim, that favoured the interests of an elite part of society at the expense of working people.

This meant that the artist should not just think about the subject of the their work but also how the form of their work should challenge the existing order.

He said that all artists had to decide whether to sup-port the existing social or-der or challenge it through their work.

19th Century Bourgeois ArtThe Pre-Raphaelites were painting as Karl Marx was writing his revolutionary works in the Reading Room of the British Museum. Marx and Friedrich Engels published the Communist Manifesto in 1848, the same year the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood formed. The young artists who joined this radical band saw through the hypocrisy of the factory owners who bought their paintings. In Isabella, painted in 1848-49, John Ev-erett Millais illustrates a me-dieval Italian tale about the daughter of a rich merchant family who loved a penniless young clerk. Isabella’s broth-

ers murder her unsuitable lover. Millais suggests these brothers have incestuous designs on their sister: one of them points a white-stock-inged leg phallically at Isabel-la. The foregrounded brothers are creepy in the extreme, but the most villainous faces in Millais’ painting belong to a row of respectable bourgeois types who share their dinner table: they radiate the cold propriety of Poor Law guard-ians. This is a painting about secrets and lies, and Millais makes it a psychodrama full of resonance with the Victorian period

Ophelia by John Everett Millais.

French Impres-sion was con-cerned with portraying hte everyday lives of the middle classes

Monet and Renior

“DADA” was the name given to an “Anti-Art” movement that began in Zurich Swit-zerland in 1916. It began in the chaotic and violent times during the first world war by exiled poets, danc-ers, artist and actors. They were fleeing the meat grinding machine of war to the safe neutral mountain country of Switzerland. This multinational mix match of creative expatriates found one thing in common as Artist Marcel Janco recalled,

“We had lost confidence in our culture. Everything had to be demolished. We

would begin again after the tabula rasa. At the Cabaret Voltaire we began by shock-ing common sense, public opinion, education, institu-tions, museums, good taste, in short, the whole prevail-ing order.”

Dada manifestos, written or co-authored by found-ing member Tristan Tzara, record that the name shares its form with various other terms, including a word used in the Kru languages of West Africa to designate the tail of a sacred cow; a toy and the name for “moth-er” in an unspecified Ital-

ian dialect; and the double affirmative in Romanian and in various Slavic languages.

In all reality “DADA” was the catch-phrase that made the least amount of sense, so they chose “DADA” and that was based on the principles of deliberate irrational-ity, anarchy, and cynicism and the rejection of laws of beauty and social organiza-tionmeeting held in 1916 at Hugo Ball’s Cabaret (Café) Voltaire in Zürich, during which a paper knife inserted into a French-German dic-tionary pointed to the word “DADA”; n.

“For us, art is not an end in itself . . . but it is an oppor-tunity for the true percep-tion and criticism of the times we live in.” Beneath the humor and absurdities of DADA -ism lies a serious moral underpinning.”

DADA - Anti Art (1916)

Raoul Hausmann, Elasticum, 1920Marce;l Duchamp , Fountain, 1917

Soviet Socialst realism

Students - Volunteers in the Fowl-Run (1973) by Evgeni Vladimirovich Semenov

From the mid-1920s, leading artists living under the communist regime were commissioned to create art that depicted and celebrated the achievements of the Bolshevik

revolution.

The rigorous aesthetic code enforced by the Soviet state, particularly once Joseph Stalin had launched the era of the Terror, stifled the intense creativity that followed the revolution of 1917, when social radical-ism appeared to have a natural affinity with artistic experimentation.

In 1932 Stalin announced a decree enti-tled “On the reconstruction of literary and art organisations”. “Decadent” forms of art, such as surrealism and expressionism, were banned and, paradoxically for a “revolu-tionary” society, artists were encouraged to explore edifying themes, often celebrat-ing the simple virtues of labour in factory and field. Those painters who did not want to comply were forced into exile or had to work in secrecy, without a public audience. Sanctioned work, the art of the socialist realists, hung in all the major public spaces for the next 60 years.

Soviet Socialst realism replaced soviet art such as that of Malevich who was a prominent painter at the tim eof the revolution

ABSTRACT IMPRESSIONISM - USA (1950s)

The idea behind Abstract Expressionism was to focus on the rawness of art, colour, the relationship between paint and canvas, and the process of painting itself. Abstract Expressionism was the outcome of a need for the artist wanting to demonstrate their passion for painting itself, through a sub-

conscious and spontaneous process.

The modern art/contemporary art move-ment of Abstract expressionism derived its name through the relationship of abstrac-tion and expressionist values being con-verged into one process.

Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline, Barnet Newman