Context

Before visiting the Agnes Martin retrospective at Tate Modern last weekend I waited for my companion in the bookshop, seduced as usual by the fascinating titles currently available in the art book market. The catalogue for an exhibition at the Viennese Albertina last year on the subject of Miró: From Earth to Sky seized my attention, so I leafed through it momentarily to take a measure of its thinking and a look at the plates; the thought of context was summoned to mind by the beginning of one essay discussing how the surrealist's personal geography played a central part in his making. In turn this gave rise to a memory of his Head of a Catalan Peasant (1925), apparently such an important motif in Miró's work which had first been brought to my knowledge at the Tate's 2011 exhibition Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape, later reprised in 2012 at the Washington National Gallery of Art. Accidental reading, chance thinking, a particular context reminding me of the notion of context: 'Miró painted thus because he lived here and thus; his topics are so because his world was so.'

We are supposed to be able to apprehend the artist's context in her work--to see the light she painted in, for example, or sense the political tenor of his age, for instance--but it is a way of thinking that leaves me a little uneasy; in fact, it has permeated my thoughts this week while exploring critical reactions to Agnes Martin among other things, and in particular as I read Karen Kurczynski's 'Drawing is the new painting'. Sitz im Leben undoubtedly benefits our analysis and interpretation of art, and it does help to lend some form of objectivity to what we say about artists and their work, but what if we clutch for context too readily, hoping to find there something? Do we not close off potential thoughts with this way of working, hobble our thinking? Working like this, can we avoid the transitive trap? And what happens when there is so much already-said out here in the world--how does the critic then dare to say anything?

Henceforth, then, I should like to talk about art in a truly context-sensitive manner: in ways that acknowledge the historical momentariness of the artist (read: the forces at work within, around and through her; political, social, critical and other) that simultaneously entertain the context-breaking, elective force of the artist.1  Here shall we say something new; thus shall we afford the possibility of the new in our thinking.

1. My use of 'elective' here echoes Brendan Prendeville in 'The meanings of acts: Agnes Martin and the making of Americans'.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Continuous Bodies

Nathaniel Stern's Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance operates like a museum in a book. So numerous and carefully juxtaposed are artworks within a network of subtly argued ideas, the reader cannot help but feel stimulated to imagine and temporarily live with the works he describes. This presence of the works that I'm highlighting is hardly surprising. Stern wishes to show how 'matter matters, however mediated' [1], and this aspiration manifests in the palpability to which his analyses give rise. The centrality of matter in interactive art, Stern argues, stems partially but importantly from the need he perceives to elaborate upon poststructuralist and later critical attitudes concerning the body's irreducibly linguistic constitution.[2] Some body art is explicit, unfolding and explicating social and economic inscriptions, but there is an equally important type of implicit body art, which aims to 'unpattern habitual actions'.[3]...
Read more

Getting ready for Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape @ Tate

There are only two days until Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape opens at Tate Modern, so I thought that I should put together an entry to help me understand how I'm going to approach the exhibition and write about it.  Miró first came to my attention in my teens, when I remember buying a print of Blue II (1961) that I subsequently had framed and hung in my room along with Matisse's Creole Dancer (1950).  His oeuvre was certainly formative in my 'awakening to art', as it were, which makes the Tate's "first major retrospective of [his] work in London in nearly 50 years" an exciting destination.  Now that I've started this blog, however, the importance of visiting has redoubled: I'd like to use the experience to learn how the curators staged the exhibition and then to speculate on the use of museum space as a learning environment for art. The roughly 150 art works on display will include drawing, prints and sculptures alongside paintings, which from ...
Read more