Saturday, October 13, 2012

Modernism and Emotion in Art

Asthmatic Bronchitis, well that's what the doctor said, from my viewpoint walking up the stairs had suddenly become a struggle.  After a couple of days denying the inevitable I gave up the fight to concentrate on work and took to my metaphorical bed, i.e. the sofa in front of the TV. Bored, very, very bored!

But, it gave some time to think. I ended up returning to a theme that has been pecking away at my brain for the last year or so, where photography and in particular my photography sits with respect to other forms of modern art.  I recently read "The Shock of the New" by Robert Hughes and whilst I very much enjoyed it a book is not the best route to visual arts no matter how well illustrated.  I have tried to find the BBC series upon which it is based on Amazon, but in vain.  I decided to Google the title and see where that took me.  Well, joy, the whole series of 8 one hour episodes together with the 2004 follow up had been placed on YouTube.  Being sick moved from tedium to delight.  The only downside is that by the time I finished the series I wanted to run out the door and head to the Museum Quarter and look at some of the works and artists featured.  Being unable to walk more than 50m without sitting down for a rest means I'll have to delay that pleasure.

I became aware of the movements of modern art from reading Gombrich's "The Story of Art", but it was Hughes's book that really opened my eyes to the art of modernism.  I have enjoyed the art of the 17th and 18th centuries, marveled at the works of the impressionists, but it was Mondrian, Rothko, and the architecture of the Bauhaus that really grabbed my attention and did not let go.  Hughes managed in 8 hours to provide a rational and accessible introduction to modernism and how it emerged and was impacted by the wars of the 20th century.  Not only did the series provide a visual guide to the art it also featured interviews with many of the practitioners.  Listening to Duschamp and Pollock talk about their own work and motivations made the art somehow more real, these were not museum fossils they were human creations made by real people in living memory.

A number of themes emerged from the series that engaged me and need more thought:

  1. The idea that many artists of the late 19th and early 20th century really believed that art was an agent for change in the world, that it could somehow influence the human race to live better more fulfilled lives.  The first world war destroyed these ideals, brutally demonstrating that the machine of killing held no respect for artistic ideals.  This war changed art forever, idealism died on the battlefields as did many artists.  In a very poignant scene Hughes stands next to a monument and simple asks if one the thousands of names inscribed on it was the English Picasso who never was. This idealism then morphed into the use of art as a tool of politics, constructivism and futurism being exploited by the left and right respectively.
  2. Another curious comment made towards the end of the series was the comparison of the media obsession of the 80's with the Dada movement of post WW1 Germany, the constant bombardment of TV a parallel to the collages created by the dadaist movement.  I wonder how that would now translate in the age of the internet, where we sit watching a TV with 200 channels, alternating our gaze between that and the omnipresent "Smart" device, phone or tablet.  The use of the word smart is interestingly deceptive, these are dumb devices, they are preventing us from ever concentrating on one thing for long enough to actually learn anything.  In the TV series the seemingly nonsensical acts of the Dada movement  have respectfully far more meaning that the fragmented information hosepipe we now drink from.  A parallel thought struck me during this episode.  We look at and engage with a work of art, we simply watch TV, the reading of images has gone from active to passive.
  3. There was a sense in the series that art was running out of steam, what was left to do.  Representational or figurative painting had almost ceased as a source of inspiration, artists had moved from interpreting reality to creating works that were an expression of their own emotional state.  Art had moved beyond the alternate realities of surrealism, cubism, even the strange and beautiful landscapes of Klee into a world in which the paint on the canvas existed purely to create or portray an emotional response.  However, here I get very engaged, there is something in Abstract Expressionism the post-war New York art movement that connects very closely with me. The shapes, colours, the sheer size of the works are almost hypnotic, the canvases contain an almost geometrical presence, simple yet complex shapes fill the frame.  In particular colour field painting and the work of Mark Rothko.
The overall sense I have of the history of modernism is a movement from the portrayal of emotion towards painting as the expression of the emotion of the artist.  Photography stepped into the hole that figurative painting left and now is largely where landscape once was.  However, how does a photographer engage with emotion in their own work.  So far I have approached Social Documentary as the disinterested observer, the voyeur capturing the emotions and activities of others.  Can I bring my own emotional state into my work.  Currently I bring my intellect, my desire for order, for putting everything in its box and straightening every picture into my work.

Photography is as subjective as painted art in the sense of the process of inclusion and exclusion, but can a single photograph convey the feelings of the person holding the camera or is it doomed to be a vehicle for portraying the emotion of the subject or the viewer.  I think the answer is yes, but at the moment I am not sure how to explain or argue that thought.  I certainly convey a piece of myself in my work, but it is more logically based than emotionally - intellect versus intuition.  Once again I am finishing a blog post with more questions than I started, however, I am becoming more convinced of the need to appreciate the broader art world in order to make better photographs.

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