I have to agree with Cheerskep on this one despite his aloof dismissal of Berger's thesis. Everyone who knows anything about art knows that the artist's "gaze" and the symbolic flavor of his time is intermingled with whatever objectivity is attempted. In portraiture, it's quite clear that a portrait by Rembrandt is different from one by, say, Katz or Pearlstein, and it's not only the characters of their sitters that account for the difference. Piling up fancy terms for decoration and robbing the graveyard for old bones, like Peirce's, are unneeded and certainly do serve the vain pretensions of academia. I also agree with Kate that if the pictures in Berger's book are interesting, then that's probably good enough. Maybe I'm just fed up with all the BS in the art world these days, the empty justifications and parlor-talk -- mummeries -- intended to distract us from the sea of ignorance engulfing contemporary society.
Quality counts. I mean the quest for perfection counts, and that's the quest for high seriousness. The artist's aim is to do something as well as it can be done which is always to aim to make something better than it has ever been done. That's as true for form as for all the psychological insight that form evokes. No one can aim for perfection in art without knowing, being almost "one-with" the best art of the past, the art that has endured all skepticism and change and misuse. This does not mean slavish imitation but its true opposite, a sympathy that comes from understanding the past and the integrity to dare to reach beyond past models, to reach through the confusion of one's own time, and to make perfection anew and now. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: Chris Miller <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sat, December 19, 2009 10:03:23 AM Subject: Reading Berger: Introduction It appears that Kate has abandoned this project after Cheerskep challenged it by writing: "Chances are that in this book's 600+ pages you won't find anything valid that you didn't know by the time you were eighteen." "note how many of them (new terms/concepts) are either attempts to reword a triviality in order to make it seem profound, or attempts to sell flatly bogus notions." Kate replied that "the book has excellent pictures so I got it anyway. On further acquaintance even the prose proved useful." But Cheerskep then asked "I hope you'll tell us of any valuable insight Berger offers to the "pose" that wouldn't have come to you on your own with three minutes ofreflection." And the thread has been quiet ever since. * ************************* But, let's pick it up again. (my copy of the book has yet to arrive, but 31 of the 32 pages of the introduction are available online at Google Books) To begin with, Cheerskep is wrong about the "new terms/concepts". Berger is rather careful (and proud) to show exactly where his terminology has originated and four of the most important (icon, symbol, index, interpretant) come from Peirce (1839-1914). Though Berger gives these terms a post-modernist twist: (page 24): " properly defined, an icon is a sign that denotes by convention that it denotes by resemblance. Thus in the transhistorical structure of discourse every category of sign function is a variant of the arbitrary sign, the symbol." .. and .. "the interpretant is the context not only of understanding but also of the legitimation of the priveleged sites of interpretation; it is a social and political as well as a semiotic and semantic function" So, as we see, Berger is among those "acolytes of Theory" which William Deresiewicz contrasts with the kind of criticism that "attends to what makes them (great art works) unique, not what makes them typical" And indeed, Berger's very first example of a portrait is not recognized as a great work at all, even if his 6-page discussion of it "contains in small compass all the themes and topics to be developed in this book. It illustrates the claim implied in my title, Fictions of the Pose, that portraits can be viewed as imitations or likenesses, not of individuals only, but also of their acts of posing" Here it is: http://www.bildindex.de/bilder/fmc653307a.jpg As Berger notes, even though it has been signed and dated "Rembrandt, 1635", the Rembrandt Research Project has attributed it to one of his students and dated it 1638, because "it's not up to speed". And more importantly, Berger shows no interest in asking why not. Which is not an especially convincing way to begin a 600 page book that's subtitled "Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance" BTW - this subtitle points directly at Kenneth Clark's , "Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance" - for which Berger was "perversely indebted" to "rethink the relation between Rembrandt and the Renaissance in terms of a set of theoretical, methodological, and interpretive principles that grew progressively different from his" So, I wouldn't expect Kate, or anyone, to find anything especially useful about Rembrandt or European portrait painting in this book that couldn't be found stated much more succinctly elsewhere. But I do find Berger to be a somewhat humorous character, so I think I'll enjoy reading "Fictions of the Pose" as a non-fictitious self portrait of his own fussy, pompous self and his "palimpsestuous relations with precursors" which he will "even at times wear them like ostrich plumes" (just like "Rembrandt" in the example shown above) And since Berger is so thorough in documenting his sources, "Fictions of the Pose" may also serve as a non-fictitious portrait of his "priveleged site of interpretation", i.e. early 21st C. academia. ____________________________________________________________ Diet Help Cheap Diet Help Tips. Click here. http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL2231/c?cp=F2AbUoWQ-NiNjGjhfzzx5wAAJz6c l_zTaptgNR5c8Mer1v9kAAYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYQAAAAAA=
