The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade
2009; Lawrence and Wishart; Issue: 67 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1741-0789
Autores Tópico(s)Cultural Industries and Urban Development
ResumoEsther Leslie John Roberts, The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade, London, Verso, 2007, 249pp; £16.99 paperback. In March 1994 the art journal October convened a panel to discuss the way in which the art of the 1960s was being received. Rosalind Krauss, Benjamin Buchloh, Annette Michelson, Hal Foster et al were all in a spin about the press' negative reception of a Robert Morris retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim. Woefully they observed other signs of a misunderstanding or rejection or repulsion - put it as you will - of all that Morris represents: a compendium of post-60s art movements and techniques, from conceptualism and Minimalism, process art and performance, installation and land art. Morris' is work that involves, in various ways, industrial materials or industrial concepts of design, the possibility of seriality, the challenge to uniqueness and skill, and an emphasis on labour and reproduction, as weU as a more or less obviously articulated concern with political and social themes. The newspaper art critics of the mid-1990s -who, unlike their 1960s forebears, had no proper art education, according to the October panellists - reviled Morris and his ilk precisely because of the deliberate expunging of expressivity, emotion, the delicate and unique hand of the artist-creator, and, above all, pictorialism. In Morris' stead these same critics championed the subject of a concurrent exhibition that fulfilled all those criteria deemed proper to art: that of Lucien Freud, described by Krauss as 'a greater phoney of which there never was one, a proponent of vacuously representational art'.1 In fact it was just one year later that Freud painted Benefits Supervisor Sleeping. That painting, with all its thick pigment directed to naturalistic effect, caused much furore in the press when it sold at Christie's New York in May 2008 for a record breaking £17.2 million, bought by the Russian investment oligarch and owner of Chelsea FC, Roman Abramovich. Freud reigns supreme at the summit of the art market. Have the New York critics' fears been amplified - and monetarily underpinned - in the last decade and a half? Are the retrograde tendencies in art victorious over the seemingly progressive moves made in the 1960s and immediately after, to expand or detonate the frame of art, to criticise art institutions, to redraft the work of the artist through modes of deskilling, reskilling, automation or seriality, to make form into anti-form and art into non-art? Is the stock of Conceptualism's derivatives at its lowest point, at least in terms of meaning-based value, if not in monetary terms, for as we know anything, however critical, ephemeral, 'streety' or self-immolating, can fetch a price, if a signature, can be at least retro-attached. Or at least it could, until the arrival of the financial crisis that was headline news by the end of 2008. John Roberts' book The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade is an attempt to think through the relationships between the avant-garde proto-conceptualists of the pre-First World War and post-1960s conceptualism and experimentalism. My reference above to Krauss and the October set is significant. It seems that to have a chance of being taken seriously as a major art critic it is necessary to write on Marcel Duchamp, the main focus of Roberts' book. Duchamp has been the fulcrum of art debates since the 1980s, key reference point for various art movements and a vehicle for the importation of 'theory' into art criticism. For the 'retrograde' art critics Duchamp is the start of all the rot. For the October critics, Duchamp is where art got interesting. Both fight over the significance of the unassisted readymade. Much as he is a post-war cause celebre, Duchamp's vast influence and notoriety has grown substantially since his death in 1968. It could be said that Duchamp burst explosively, onto the post-war art scene, like something that had been kept hidden, under pressure. …
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