CCS 2005-2006
Mini-programme 1
DR KEN NEIL
PHILOSOPHY IN
MODERN AND
CONTEMPORARY ART
PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS OF
CONTEMPORANEITY SEEN AND
EMBODIED IN ART
CCS 2005-2006
Stages 2 and 3
Philosophy in Modern and
Contemporary Art
Lecture Three Monday 17th Oct
TODAY’S FOUR SECTIONS:
1.
Baudelaire and the
authentic moment.
2.
Danto and historical
contemporary art.
3.
When is now?
4.
Embodying the now and
enacting the
contemporary.
CCS 2005-2006
Stages 2 and 3
Philosophy in Modern and
Contemporary Art
Lecture Three Monday 17th Oct
1
Charles Baudelaire 1821-1867
Baudelaire,
the
great
poet
translator and critic, is for many
one of the most prescient authors
of Modernity.
His poetry and criticism seemed
to capture the spirit of the
modern age, and looked forward
perceptively to 20thC culture.
CCS 2005-2006
Stages 2 and 3
Philosophy in Modern and
Contemporary Art
Lecture Three Monday 17th Oct
1
For Baudelaire - the artist had to
be ‘of his own times’ before
he could legitimately claim to
be a Modern artist.
“Woe to him who studies the
antique for anything else other
It was a mistake, he said, for the than pure art, logic and general
artist to look to antecedents
method! By steeping himself
within the history of art if one too thoroughly in it, he will lose
wanted to paint aspects of the all memory of the present; he
present.
will renounce the rights and
privileges offered by
circumstance - for almost all our
originality comes from the seal
which Time imprints on our
sensations.”
CCS 2005-2006
Stages 2 and 3
Philosophy in Modern and
Contemporary Art
Lecture Three Monday 17th Oct
Edgar Degas L’Absinthe 1876
CCS 2005-2006
Stages 2 and 3
Philosophy in Modern and
Contemporary Art
Lecture Three Monday 17th Oct
Umberto Boccioni The City Rises 1910
CCS 2005-2006
Stages 2 and 3
Philosophy in Modern and
Contemporary Art
Lecture Three Monday 17th Oct
Constantin Guys Equipage in the Park Late19thC
CCS 2005-2006
Stages 2 and 3
Philosophy in Modern and
Contemporary Art
Lecture Three Monday 17th Oct
1
“Be very sure that this man Constantin Guys, this solitary,
gifted with an active imagination, ceaselessly journeying
across the great human desert - has an aim loftier than that of
a mere flaneur, an aim more general, something other than
the fugitive pleasure of circumstance.
He is looking for that quality which you must allow me to call
‘modernity’. He makes it his business to extract from
fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry
within history, to distil the eternal from the transitory.”
“By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugutive, the
contingent, the half of art whose other half is the
eternal and the immutable”.
CCS 2005-2006
Stages 2 and 3
Philosophy in Modern and
Contemporary Art
Lecture Three Monday 17th Oct
1
1
Modernity, for Baudelaire, was all
about the spirit of the then
contemporary age. To be a Modern
artist one had to keenly observe and
generate work from the wonderful
sights and sounds of the immediate
world.
The authentic Modern artist does not
seek to move outwith the time in
which he finds himself.
CCS 2005-2006
Stages 2 and 3
Baudelaire’s Modern art is
forward looking and positivist
- it assumes responsibility for
pushing art into new,
uncharted futures,
apprehending the eternal
from the transitory as it
proceeds.
Philosophy in Modern and
Contemporary Art
Lecture Three Monday 17th Oct
1
•In a sense, despite the distinctions which Baudelaire draws between
art and technology, Modern art as he described it might be compared,
for the sake of argument, to the Davey Lamp.
•Progress requires invention and innovation to meet the challenges and
hurdles set down by the developing Modern world.
•So - George Davey’s lamp addresses the Modern problem of fire-damp
explosions and Umberto Boccioni’s Futurist painting addresses the
problem of depicting the multiplicity which characterised the Modern
age.
•Both examples take for granted a progressive role for technology and
art, even if one practice is seen as loftier than the other.
•In other words, both examples of Modern practice assume that
the past, that is - discipline precedents, are there to be
triumphed over, surpassed, as the respective disciplines move
forward into subsequent Modernities, wherein the same process
takes place.
CCS 2005-2006
Stages 2 and 3
Philosophy in Modern and
Contemporary Art
Lecture Three Monday 17th Oct
2
Arthur Danto (and the German theorist Hans Belting) put
forward arguments (in the 1980s) to suggest, however, that
Modern art, as described by Baudelaire and others, is
different across time from Contemporary art.
This might mean that, Boccioni’s Modern art for example or the
work of Constantin Guys, although obviously once upon a time
contemporary, should not be seen as Contemporary as we might
understand that term now after having read Danto and Belting.
Why so?
CCS 2005-2006
Stages 2 and 3
Philosophy in Modern and
Contemporary Art
Lecture Three Monday 17th Oct
2
“Contemporary art has no brief against the art of the
past, no sense that the art of the past is something
from which liberation must be won.
It is part of what defines Contemporary art that the art
of the past is available for such use as artists care to
give it.”
Danto
CCS 2005-2006
Stages 2 and 3
Philosophy in Modern and
Contemporary Art
Lecture Three Monday 17th Oct
2
Boccioni, practicing authentic
Modernist philosophy, saw the art
forms of the immediate past as
forms from which the present,
dynamic, contemporary (with a
small ‘c’) artists must liberate
themselves.
Umberto Boccioni ‘Elasticity’ 1912
CCS 2005-2006
Stages 2 and 3
In short, he exercised himself
over producing artworks which
spoke to a Baudelairean
philosophy of the unfolding
progression of art, both in terms
of its forms and in terms of what
it paid attention to.
Philosophy in Modern and
Contemporary Art
Lecture Three Monday 17th Oct
2
Contemporary for Danto requires the artist to break
free from the antagonism towards the artistic forms of
the past, something which Boccioni did not do.
In breaking free, the Contemporary artist also breaks
free from the idea that the present is destined to be
better than the past - which is our myth of the Davey
lamp, a myth which excludes questions of true value.
CCS 2005-2006
Stages 2 and 3
Philosophy in Modern and
Contemporary Art
Lecture Three Monday 17th Oct
2
Jasper Johns Perilous Night 1982
Jasper Johns’s work, for example, is frequently constructed by
‘present pasts’ - and resembles Danto’s conception of
Contemporary. It embraces a post-historicity.
CCS 2005-2006
Stages 2 and 3
Philosophy in Modern and
Contemporary Art
Lecture Three Monday 17th Oct
2
But Danto’s idea of
the Contemporary,
logically, can also be
seen in examples of
historical art.
Manet here famously
incorporated a
composition from a
painting by Raphael
as seen through an
etching by
Marcantonio
Raimondi.
Edouard Manet Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe 1863
CCS 2005-2006
Stages 2 and 3
Philosophy in Modern and
Contemporary Art
Lecture Three Monday 17th Oct
2
Gavin Turk here famously appears
as Sid Vicious, dressed as Elvis as
seen through a screenprint by
Andy Warhol.
Gavin Turk Pop 1993
Warhol Elvis 1963
CCS 2005-2006
Stages 2 and 3
Philosophy in Modern and
Contemporary Art
Lecture Three Monday 17th Oct
3
When is now?
Now is of course now (I think) but now involves then, and it is
the attitude towards the ‘then’ that Danto concerns himself
with.
And perhaps our Contemporary attitude to ‘then’ has resulted in
a superficial and spectacular version of culture, progress and
development has been forgotten and style and posturing has
taken the place of positivist art making?
CCS 2005-2006
Stages 2 and 3
Philosophy in Modern and
Contemporary Art
Lecture Three Monday 17th Oct
4
So - Danto sets out a difference between capturing the
contemporary spirit of the age of this ‘now’ (which is akin to
Baudelaire’s Modernity) and producing artwork which is actually
Contemporary.
This might be summarised by saying that there is a
difference between
embodying the now and enacting the contemporary.
CCS 2005-2006
Stages 2 and 3
Philosophy in Modern and
Contemporary Art
Lecture Three Monday 17th Oct
4
Ralph Goings, an American
Photorealist painter, can be seen
to be an artist who embodies the
now, utilising new departures in
painterly technique in the process
- not unlike Degas and Guys.
CCS 2005-2006
Stages 2 and 3
Philosophy in Modern and
Contemporary Art
Lecture Three Monday 17th Oct
4
Perhaps Tracey Emin can be seen to
be an artist who enacts the
Contemporary, by being an artist
whose styles are historical and
contemporary (with a small ‘c’); she
does not seek to take art beyond the
past into its new future, like a Guys
or a Boccioni, in fact, she darkly
revels in the past as if to make the
very point that her present moment
is constantly wrestling with the past,
and the two elements are made
visible as part of that struggle.
CCS 2005-2006
Stages 2 and 3
Philosophy in Modern and
Contemporary Art
Lecture Three Monday 17th Oct
4
Tracey Emin Just Remember How It Was 1998
CCS 2005-2006
Stages 2 and 3
Philosophy in Modern and
Contemporary Art
Lecture Three Monday 17th Oct
Chapman Brothers Insult to Injury 2003
Last word to:
Boccioni Fusion of Head and Window 1912
CCS 2005-2006
Stages 2 and 3
The Discursive Frame
Philosophy in Modern and
Contemporary Art
Lecture Three Monday 17th Oct