Technique and style should be de-contextualised from social and political-economic context (as this sentence should be properly sub- edited). If your subject is art that is. If you are interested in art markets then by all means get on with the political economy. But don't confuse the two. (Jim Heartfield) -----------------------------
I wrote a long post on art and didn't send it. It assumed too much background and read as if it were from the middle of a conversation. In other words, it probably wouldn't have made sense. I'll try again, but I am reasonably sure, it will sound more or less the same.
Jim Heartfield to wants a theory of art that is about art and how it functions, not a theory about society or economics. A plain jane, de-contextualized theory, dammit all.
You can't begin to understand how art functions, why its compositions, color and spatial metaphors are the way they are and work the way they work, without considering the context. One way around this problem is to figure out were you want to end up with a theory in advance, then proceed to get there. So, you pick the end point in advance of the theory. Since this isn't science or analytical philosophy, nobody is under any obligation to advance premises, and then deduce conclusions. You start with the conclusions and work backward. It makes more sense in this particular domain. I want to end up with mass media and culture and to understand it in relation to art, because in many ways they seem to be the same sort of world. That is, they seem more analogous to one another than to any other sort of activity.
If we start with just the formal devices and the manual skills, the way art criticism and most art theory does, we never get to understand anything about the meanings, the changing relations between art and society, the reasons some works have become part of the long history and others, apparently as well done, become obscure. We also have no idea why there are historical shifts from a representational space to a flat space and back again. These changes appear to be merely arbitrary stylistic shifts of taste. And what accounts for taste?
So, instead, start near the end. My particular end point is also related to a slightly different question. I want to know why there is such a thing as art and why every society back into pre-history has created art in some form or other. Since we seem to produce quite terrible traditional works and interest in the arts has dropped to virtually zero, then has whatever function art used to perform also disappeared? How come art was always religious works and only as we became secular, did the arts seem to liberate themselves from such a domination? Then finally, if you can answer all these sorts of questions, what is the relation between all of that to the actual means employed in making art? I mean how do these sorts of historical changes effect the use of space, color, form, and the material supports?
Okay. Art doesn't exist. You can not circumscribe the arts and write down everything about them, like a laundry list. The same is true of language and mathematics. The reason is they are systems, prescriptions, processes that are carried on in both time and space and can not be completed. What language, art, and mathematics share is that they are conceptual universes of abstract processes and forms that are never completely manifested in any single moment or even a singular sequence of moments. This means that you can not construct a representation of any of them that is sufficiently comprehensive to be both accurate and intelligible.
So, focusing in on just the visual arts and assuming some version of the above as a starting and ending point, what is the symbolic system of art about? Well it is about everything. In other words it has methods to represent everything, just as language and mathematics. These are symbolic representational systems that simultaneously represent, construct, compose, and constitute all at the same time. As symbolic systems together they represent, order, interpret, conceive, and comprehend communication, society, culture and the physical world. To a certain extent linguistic, artistic, and logico-mathematical systems are interchangeable in the sense that you can construct at least an incomplete, inaccurate, but intelligible representation of one, through various means of the others. For example we have writing, a visual representation of language. And we have various sorts of diagrams and notation schemes to represent counting, and general spatio-temporal, logico-physical figurations.
What has differentiated these systems into separate, distinguishable systems is a combination of a developing social and cultural organization, i.e. civilizations with specialization and divisions of labor, and of course evolving historical developments. So, it is always impossible to de-contextualize just about any of these later specializations, because they are never completely separated from their own embedding web of relationships to communication and other socio-cultural, historical and economic dependencies. These dependencies are in fact the processes that have constructed the differentiations in the first place.
Just as language can never be language without its physical expression, so art is never art without its physical expressions, and the complex of logico-physical constructs is never without its figurations. So symbolic universes always have concrete mediums as their means of configuration and communication. They also compliment and augment one another, so that together they form a fully articulated complex that can represent and communicate existence. We can see all of these symbolic universes melded together in an apparently seamless whole whose primary production, is a mythological universe, a meta-system of conceptualizations, through which concrete existence is given representation but also additional dimension, force, design, justification, and inhabited with further entities. This meta-universe of symbolic expression is also the conceptual ground in which the imaginary play of reasons, images, explanations, justifications, experience and memory can be melded together in an apparently frictionless physicality. So, that legend, history, and origins, reveal the ontology, teleology, and epistemology of everything that is. Thus gods and physical forces are together manifested in figurations of meta-time and meta-place.
While all this may seem a sort of questionable anthropology that we have surpassed long ago, in fact we have never escaped such a mythological envelop. Instead we have transformed it through all our technological prowess into the physical reality of mass media, mass communication, mass culture. In such a virtual or meta-time and place, we design, build, express, and figure through all the coordinated resources of the symbolic universes of form just as always, just as before. In such a vast technologically enhanced meta-universe we find everyone and everything present in their frictionless finery from Albert Einstein to Superman, and the Big Bang to Bangladesh, to all the gods and goddess of every civilization that has ever been, through all the worlds that will never be. There played out in vast display is a world, a meta-world that is nevertheless real, tangible and perhaps even more meaningful than our own more barren concrete and wary lives. It is quite literally magic, and very much a mythic system--all of it, all together everywhere. We carry it in our minds and talk to it, dream about it, and live it, interpreting it and interpret through it the rest of our experience, our imagination, other people, and the more mundane physical world around us.
Here is a quote from another, completely unrelated post:
"The heading of the leading article runs "Der Traum von einer neuen Finanzarchitektur" [The Dream of a New Financial Architecture]. It is written by J. Bradford DeLong. The author concludes his contribution by stating that "dreams of a basically rebuilt, reformed and renewed international financial architecture are but shadows."
Think about the words used here for a moment, 'dreams of...a renewed...architecture are but shadows' That isn't just a rhetorical phrase, an allusion to Shakespeare. That is mythos rendered in a lyric to money, a representation of representations of representations. And yet, drawing upon a mythological universe of forms, detracts nothing. In fact it adds to the clarity, and refines the intelligibility.
Chuck Grimes
PS. I am perfectly willing to discuss Abstract Expressionism, color field painting, the art market, graphic design, sculpture, and figure drawing if you want to go in that direction. But, the above sketch is the back drop or context against which I am also trying to place these latter sorts of topics.