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``Through his determined scrubbing, Robbe-Grillet attempts to strip these stones of their content, no doubt a reference to his wish to remove hidden meanings from every object. Yet Robbe-Grillet's efforts are ultimately as unavailing as...His is the consummate form of philosophic inquiry, squeezing meaning out of solid rock.''
My favorite is the last painting in the series, `Robbe-Grillet Cleansing Every Object in Sight'' 1981.
I read Robbe-Grillet and got completely fascinated with his formal techniques, particularly a set of short stories called `Snap Shots' in 1971. I'd recommend it for anyone interested. (I might have written this before.) I took one story called The Alibi and set up a series of large (11 x 14) photos that attempted to re-create the reflected points of view between three different situations in the permutations of Teacher reading, student reading, Teacher silent looking out a window watching another student inspecting the trunk of a tree, while a student is reading a passage the Teacher had just selected. The student was essentially reading to nobody. It is the `no there, there' syndrome. I had a friend's ten year old son read the short story in that blank voice that kids use when they can read the words, but have no idea what the story means. I had this loop tape fashion in a plexiglas box with an on/off switch sitting next to the thirty-six photos. (This was another of the flops nobody understood, even with the story read to them.)
Whether R-G intended to get rid of the metaphorical or `meaning' dimension to a narrative or not, the effect of his work in this case created a tremendous potential for the bizarre, the surreal, and the unintelligible, which in turn serve to express in pretty stark terms the utter alienation of people from each other and the processes of life and society.
Many years later, I took up drawing again and began to try to re-figure out how to construct a narrative. Caravaggio is a really good model to work from in this dimension, because his narratives are pretty clear, at least to me.
It was the `narrative' aspect to art that had been under attack on and off in most of the 20thC. Think about Picasso and Gertrude Stein. She like his analytical cubism for its concentration on deconstructing perspective. Then when Picasso switched into the synthetic style and later to the mythological subjects, Stein accused him of being a traitor to modernity or something like that. So following Picasso's various moves in around the concept of narrative is a pretty good illustration of what continued to be announcements of modernity dogma and resistances from both the public and many artists to any of that.
Sure there were lots of exceptions this core formalism, but that was the dominant paradigm. One of the many losses was the ability to tell a story, even a simple one. Nobody, except one printmaking teacher for example knew how to assemble the narrative elements in a work to create the subject matter. Freed used the bible stories and then later, much more successfully, the late tragedies of Shakespeare.
What makes this essential to art, is that most of western art in the past was just that, a narrative drawn from life, the bible, or from the greco-roman mythologies. Most students and probably viewers have no idea who Eros and Psyche were or what they represent. So a whole dimension of culture is lost.
Another example. Picasso did a series of still lifes during WWII in Paris. But you have look at the subject matter in relation to the period in order to understand them. They are all about the potential possibility of life still emerging from the chains of long nights of the war. So there are candles on tables with a bowl of cherry tomatoes grown from potted tomato plants, and a skull set up to echo Georges de la Tour's Magdalene series. Or a potted tomato plant against a black-out window. Here is one, click on the enlarge:
http://www.christies.com/Lotfinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=4807458
I sure miss LAMOA, up here. Getting back to Tansey, much of his magical humor and philosophical insight would go straight over most viewer's heads, including most art students. I hope his exhibits have more than just title, date, material, and dimensions.
CG