Description

Several years ago Tom Wolfe made the satirical observation regarding abstract art that, despite the hostility of its advocates to the notion of art having literary content, it did in fact have its very own literature, a vast body of theoretical writing which, in his opinion, the works served to illustrate. This module investigates the connections between the practice of abstract art and the production of theory, exploring the large number of ways in which artists, critics, art historians and philosophers have not only written to account for abstraction in the visual arts but used the theorising of abstract art as a vehicle to make arguments about the world in general. The module does not provide a chronological account of the emergence and development of abstract art, although historical questions will be very prominent. For example, how was it that the practice of abstract art in the twentieth century was linked to theories concerning the imminent demise of art itself? A representative of such an outlook was the American artist Ad Reinhardt who for the last decade of his career made nothing but square, black paintings, commenting that, ‘I’m merely making the last painting which anyone can make.’ Despite the apparent lack of content of his paintings, Reinhardt’s writings, which describe in great detail all the ways in which they do not represent anything, run to hundreds of pages. Are they just compensating for the apparent vacuity of the paintings? The module will approach this question by considering how abstract art was positioned by its practitioners, advocates and some interpreters as a form of theoretical exploration.

The intellectual tradition which gave rise to Reinhardt’s view of history is the aesthetic theory derived from the philosophies of Kant and Hegel which had great currency among the abstract artists of the early twentieth century. The module will begin with a brief introduction to this body of thought and to the emergence of aesthetics as a distinct branch of philosophical enquiry. From that point on the module will be structured around debates and problems rather than chronology. The emphasis will be on establishing the often contradictory explanations given of abstract art’s place in the world, setting up counterpoints between claims for the status of abstract art as a form of mystical insight against the assertion of its potential for expressive communication, connections drawn to the psychology of perception against semiotic theory, and phenomenological accounts of the encounter with the art object against challenges to the ontological status of art itself.

Objectives

By the end of the module, students should have acquired:

• knowledge of some of the major practitioners of abstract art in the twentieth century and their writings
• some understanding of the variety of ways in which abstract art has been theorised
• some understanding of the relationship between practice and theory in twentieth-century art.

Preliminary Reading

• Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model (MIT Press, 1993)
• Noël Carroll, ‘Avant-garde Art and the Problem of Theory’ Journal of Aesthetic Education vol.29, no.3 (1995), pp.1-13
• Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. Michael Sadler (Dover: New York, 1977)
• W.J.T.Mitchell, ‘ “Ut Pictura Theoria”: Abstract Painting and the Repression of Language’ Critical Inquiry vol.15, no.2 (1989), pp.348-371
• Piet Mondrian, The New Art – The New Life: the Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, ed. and trans. By Harry Holtzmann and Martin James (Thames and Hudson, 1987)
• Robert Morris, Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (MIT Press, 1993)
• Ad Reinhardt, Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt (University of California Press, 1975)
• Gerhard Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting (Thames and Hudson, 1995)