the A of abstract/modern art.
A is for Appropriation. Appropriation that is at the heart of White , Western world of Modern/Abstract Art. Appropriation that was part and parcel of the Colonialism that created the idea of 'Progress' from "Primitivism" to Modernism and used it to justify the plunder of more than just the Art and Culture of Others. Plunder that is continuing even today.
As is the promotion of the myth of White led Modernity.
Linga : Appropriation Art. Kathmandu valley.
Elvis Presley borrowed so much from James Brown that when James Brown saw him perform he said, “That’s me up there.” Like music critics who give credit to Elvis Presley for the creation of rock ‘n roll, ignoring Ike Turner or Chuck Berry, the same kind of chauvinism happens in the art world, when complete credit is given to white European and American artists for the creation of Modern Art.
I have yet to visit this show, so am not questioning if the works are worthy of being considered of great importance to the development of modernism. What I am reacting to is the fact that this show’s title and premise deliberately ignores the full picture, refuting mountains of evidence found over centuries of human history.
Facts such as the fossilized engravings found in the South African Blomos Cave, proven to be about 77,000 years old, which provide the earliest known evidence humans were creating abstract images since at least the Middle Stone Age era. This find was first reported in January 2002 in the well respected journals Science and Scientific American. Facts such as the well documented abstract images found in cave paintings, as figurines, and decorative detailing on utilitarian objects made during the Upper Paleolithic era, 40,000 ago, and the huge influence of monuments of archaic cultures such as Stonehenge, and the pictographs over 50 miles of Peruvian desert, thought to have been created between 200 BC and 700 AD by the Nazca Indians, a United Nations World Heritage site since 1994. Closer to home, explorers, adventurers and archeologists have uncovered abstract images in the altered landscapes of earth mounds, scattered throughout the Midwest and Southern United States, some dating as early as 250 BCE, including artifacts such as copper figures, shards of pottery and bits of fabrics, which demonstrate abstraction was a widely popular form of representation long before the twentieth century.
The fact that Surrealism’s philosopher André Breton famously displayed a “wall of objects,” behind his desk in his Paris atelier where he lived from 1922 to 1966. This collection easily fulfills standard definitions of abstraction. There were sculptures from the South Pacific islands of Easter Island, New Guinea and New Ireland, besides other artworks including Native American, pre-Hispanic Mexican and Inuit objects, along with paintings and engravings by his friends and associates, including Francis Picabia, Roberto Matta, Wassily Kandinsky and various famous others. Breton’s wall was transferred and installed at the Centre Pompidou’s show, “La Révolution Surréaliste” (2002), and was featured in critic Alan Riding’s article for The New York Times (December 17, 2002) when everything in Breton’s estate except the wall was being prepared for a 2003 auction. Riding says Breton was especially inspired by Oceanic art, considering it “one of the great lock-keepers of our heart.” Ishmael Reed, after viewing Breton’s collection in Paris commented that “instead of being called a Surrealist, Breton should be called an Africanist.”
So it is well known, certainly in art world circles, that many modern artists experimenting with new forms have been avaricious collectors of images and objects made for everyday home or ceremonial use in non-European cultures, be they ceramics, basketry, textiles, hide paintings, beading and quillwork, masks and other sculptures made of wood, carved stone, wrought iron, and so forth. So many artists, of all ethnicities, have used these pre-existing objects, ancient or not, to create new works that the art world accepted and defined the practice with terms such as “borrowed,” “appropriated,” and “found.”
Jerry Saltz, writing “MoMA’s Inventing Abstraction is Illuminating—Although It Shines That Light Mighty Selectively,” on the website www. vulture.com, confirms that the selections focus on white practicioners of Abstraction: “There’s an empty gallery devoted to music by Stravinsky, Debussy and others: Fine. But there’s no Scott Joplin! No Dixieland, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong or Jelly Roll Morton. All are as original and as ‘abstract’ as these Europeans.”
As is the promotion of the myth of White led Modernity.
Linga : Appropriation Art. Kathmandu valley.
Elvis Presley borrowed so much from James Brown that when James Brown saw him perform he said, “That’s me up there.” Like music critics who give credit to Elvis Presley for the creation of rock ‘n roll, ignoring Ike Turner or Chuck Berry, the same kind of chauvinism happens in the art world, when complete credit is given to white European and American artists for the creation of Modern Art.
Case in point: New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) recently opened an exhibition of art practices in Eastern and Western Europe and the United States in the early twentieth century titled “Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925.” On view from December 23, 2012 through April 15, 2013, their promotional materials proclaim:
“Abstraction may be modernism’s greatest innovation. Today it is so central to the conception of artmaking that the time when an abstract artwork was unimaginable has become hard to imagine.”
I have yet to visit this show, so am not questioning if the works are worthy of being considered of great importance to the development of modernism. What I am reacting to is the fact that this show’s title and premise deliberately ignores the full picture, refuting mountains of evidence found over centuries of human history.
Facts such as the fossilized engravings found in the South African Blomos Cave, proven to be about 77,000 years old, which provide the earliest known evidence humans were creating abstract images since at least the Middle Stone Age era. This find was first reported in January 2002 in the well respected journals Science and Scientific American. Facts such as the well documented abstract images found in cave paintings, as figurines, and decorative detailing on utilitarian objects made during the Upper Paleolithic era, 40,000 ago, and the huge influence of monuments of archaic cultures such as Stonehenge, and the pictographs over 50 miles of Peruvian desert, thought to have been created between 200 BC and 700 AD by the Nazca Indians, a United Nations World Heritage site since 1994. Closer to home, explorers, adventurers and archeologists have uncovered abstract images in the altered landscapes of earth mounds, scattered throughout the Midwest and Southern United States, some dating as early as 250 BCE, including artifacts such as copper figures, shards of pottery and bits of fabrics, which demonstrate abstraction was a widely popular form of representation long before the twentieth century.
The fact that Surrealism’s philosopher André Breton famously displayed a “wall of objects,” behind his desk in his Paris atelier where he lived from 1922 to 1966. This collection easily fulfills standard definitions of abstraction. There were sculptures from the South Pacific islands of Easter Island, New Guinea and New Ireland, besides other artworks including Native American, pre-Hispanic Mexican and Inuit objects, along with paintings and engravings by his friends and associates, including Francis Picabia, Roberto Matta, Wassily Kandinsky and various famous others. Breton’s wall was transferred and installed at the Centre Pompidou’s show, “La Révolution Surréaliste” (2002), and was featured in critic Alan Riding’s article for The New York Times (December 17, 2002) when everything in Breton’s estate except the wall was being prepared for a 2003 auction. Riding says Breton was especially inspired by Oceanic art, considering it “one of the great lock-keepers of our heart.” Ishmael Reed, after viewing Breton’s collection in Paris commented that “instead of being called a Surrealist, Breton should be called an Africanist.”
So it is well known, certainly in art world circles, that many modern artists experimenting with new forms have been avaricious collectors of images and objects made for everyday home or ceremonial use in non-European cultures, be they ceramics, basketry, textiles, hide paintings, beading and quillwork, masks and other sculptures made of wood, carved stone, wrought iron, and so forth. So many artists, of all ethnicities, have used these pre-existing objects, ancient or not, to create new works that the art world accepted and defined the practice with terms such as “borrowed,” “appropriated,” and “found.”
Jerry Saltz, writing “MoMA’s Inventing Abstraction is Illuminating—Although It Shines That Light Mighty Selectively,” on the website www. vulture.com, confirms that the selections focus on white practicioners of Abstraction: “There’s an empty gallery devoted to music by Stravinsky, Debussy and others: Fine. But there’s no Scott Joplin! No Dixieland, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong or Jelly Roll Morton. All are as original and as ‘abstract’ as these Europeans.”
Buried in the second paragraph of MoMA’s “Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925” press release is the far more accurate term, “reinvented,” which could easily have been chosen for use in the show’s title and point of view. So why pretend only white European and American artists practiced abstract art in the early 20th century and are the first in history to do so?
Journalist Ron Suskind reported a George W. Bush administration insider told him: “We are an empire now and when we act we create our own reality.” Can it be that in areas of art and culture, museums also believe they are entitled to create their own “facts”?
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/01/18/the-presleying-of-abstract-art/
posted by Satish Sharma at
10:42
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