Yet the general public saw in the nonobjectivity of the
representation the demise of art and >failed to grasp the evident fact
that feeling had here assumed external form

this tension between "communication vrs intent" has a long history and
something that gets hotly contested when in comes to contemporary art
practice.

the crucial point is here that of the "public".
avant garde art practice has always fashioned itself under the shadow
of the rupture. they visualised their practice as constantly breaking
new ground and so an initial incomprehensibility was very much a part
of the process.

now, those heroic postures of high modernist avant garde art -
particularly architecture, with its determined refusal to listen to
the voice on the street that actually wanted decorative French
railings instead of stark, minimal facades - has been critiqued and
unpacked in quite a great degree of detail in recent years. i will not
get into that here.

but i think you will agree that the "public" is not a apriori
conceptual category. a very specific public is imagined into existence
through specific interventions as shared codes of appreciation do not
emerge spontaneously. to repeat an often repeated anecdote: when the
Lumiere brothers showed their film of a train pulling into a platform,
it scared their audience who were experiencing the cinematic image for
the first time. They were scared that the train would move into the
theatre and run over them.

I would imagine that the 'public' in the village of Heggodu[1]
wouldn't be that befuddled by say something like absurd theatre .

[1] ttp://www.rmaf.org.ph/Awardees/Citation/CitationSubbannaKV.htm
http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/jul242005/sundayherald1230252005722.asp



On 4/25/07, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
of course, minimalist art can indeed be entirely in the eye of the beholder, 
unless augmented by some explanation of the artist's intention. here is 
malevich:
The black square on the white field was the first form in which nonobjective 
feeling came to be expressed. The square = feeling, the white field = the void 
beyond this feeling. Yet the general public saw in the nonobjectivity of the 
representation the demise of art and failed to grasp the evident fact that 
feeling had here assumed external form. [1]

-rishab
1. http://www.rollins.edu/Foreign_Lang/Russian/suprem.html

 On Wed, Apr 25, 2007 at 06:56:09AM +0530, Abhishek Hazra wrote:
> minimalism in visual art, can be often mistaken, for a smart con-job.
> And particularly for the early modernist masters like Malevich, one
> almost seems warranted to ask, "what's so great about that black
> square on white background? Even I could do that on MS Paint?"




--
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
does the frog know it has a latin name?
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Reply via email to