nybiennaleart rothko contemporary art New York

THE IMMATERIALISM

 

Curator: Fabrizio Lollini

Artist: Rothko

 

About twenty years ago, a great historian of art, Michael Baxandall, wrote a fundamental book for the methodology of the studies, Patterns of Intention, in which, on the basis of a series of principles, he proposes an “inferential criticism” based on nature and fundamental affirmations that we support when we analyze a work of art. That is to say, “If we think or speak of a picture as, among other things, the product of situated volition or intention, what is it that we are doing?” He analyzes, for instance, the expectations that we have towards the work of art as bearer of the formal values of the period (How can we know them? What value they assume for us? How can we be sure that the public is aware of them?) He studies the relationships between the artist and his potential target, the artist and his colleagues, the artist and his client (Did they use common communicational codes? So then, how can we explain the changing of the taste during history? When we speak about “stylistic influence” what do we mean exactly?) Or, again, the relationship between the work of art and the scientific (or philosophical and economical) theories of its period (How can we affirm that the artistic product mirrors them, and if this reflection is intentional or not?)

 

All this, taking on Baxandall’s previous studies, is made more complicated from the fact that in order to express any critical judgment, we use a language that is not the one of the work of art, that is to say it’s not the visual or sensorial one. Rather, it is the cultural one, which belongs to the written language and bases itself on its own structures that change throughout time.

In the previously quoted text, the critical effort is displayed in four examples, which are different

for technical typology and periods: an iron bridge, the scotch Fort Bridge; Picasso’s Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler; Chardin’s A Lady Taking Tea; and Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ.

The chronological order is not respected, because the matter of method, though applied to different objects, must respect a formal rigour that transcends the specificity of the singular case (however bearing it in our mind).

 

Apart from that, and from some other few anomalous cases of methodological consciousness, especially in the phenomenological sphere, what would happen if the mental forms of contemporary art history were applied to the concrete production of exhibition catalogues, monographic studies or other scientific occasions, to medieval art? Or vice versa? If we read the Renaissance, as the manuals or the students of art history usually do, as “avant-garde” in the modern twentieth-century sense of the term, we will not understand neither its importance, nor its ways of diffusion, nor even the influences on (and from) the client’s taste.

 

The mimetic distance from the visual reality that an impressionist, or a futurist, or even a landscapist puts in his works, cannot be measured, neither on the basis of motivation nor on material ways, similar to the iconic allusiveness of Byzantine art. There is a feeling of the loss of references in metaphysical art, for instance, like how we feel when we look at Duchamp’s pissoir or bottle dryer, but also at a steady filming of a skyscraper.

Could this be possible in the art of the fourteenth century? The famous pipe, perfectly mimetic, doesn’t aim to be what it is, as the man of an Irish miniaturist of the early Middle Ages pretends to be what he is not, that is to say a material and recognizable reality.

 

The examples could be numerous.

 

Most contemporary critics base themselves on the outpouring of known facts regarding the author of the work of art seen in the work itself. From Picasso to Warhol to Haring we have a large documentation, which has built a sort of a daily agenda. But if we go back to the past ages where the information is fewer this agenda we are less likely to find. Hasn’t Cimabue only been a phase of Italian Art for the Anglo-Saxon world, losing a specific argumentum ad personam? (Not by chance, of his 50-year long activity as an artist we know only two concrete facts, as archival data). So, when we have a scheme of interpretation so lacking in details do we need to eliminate in the critical process the need to turn to biographic analysis? Yet, we are still attached to

the idea of genius and formal independence, especially in periods when the artist is quite far from contemporary representation. Some interpretations of medieval production as craftsmen clashed with the fondness for a history of art made of people, as we have been taught by Vasari: Yes, Antelami and Giotto are in fact multiple productive entities, but they are also – and they must be – identifiable as characters of an absolute level.

 

The idea of materiality opposed to the one of immateriality is not a key of interpretation exclusively based on the present age. Of course, the “immaterial values” that Bacon expresses with material choices in his manner of painting, in relation to the support constituted by the canvas, don’t follow the same of Titian.

 

Today, when with a plastic card pretending to be money (immaterial money) we buy two letters pretending to be a pair of jeans, or underwear, this doesn’t have a direct parallel to the Middle Ages, even if the signatures of Calvin Klein and Giotto have something in common. They express an immaterial value of quality with reference to the physicality of the object.

 

We don’t know what Piero della Francesca was thinking concerning the concrete values of his media, in his projects, perceptively rationalizing spaces and shapes. Sometimes we have the impression that he would gladly give up his tables, lime, and chalk if he had available realities that today we would define as more “virtual” (He could be thought as the remote patron of the supporters of Photoshop and AutoCAD).

While we all know very well Bill Viola’s theoretical speculations about technical devices able to overpass the instant temporality, in order to enter a tradition, that is, in the majority of the cases, deliberately and deeply “classic”.

 

Early on, Petrarch made a distinction between the learned elite and the uneducated public, between the expectations of the ones “who know” and the simpler ones “who don’t,” the stifling nature of ignorant evaluations like “Ah…look! What a nice painting! It seems like a picture!” and, “Look at this nice picture, it really seems like a painting!” always exist, and constitute the basis of a fundamental matter of art history.

 

From ancient Greek painters on, from Apelle‘s flowers and fruits, which seem so real that the birds crash into the wall in order to pick them up, some of the principles of evaluation have always been how far is the work of art from the reality that it portrays or suggests, if this distance is consciously achieved, or, vice versa, unintentional and not perceived and, finally, if it is permissible to see in the painting, or sculpture, something different from what materially we see.

 

In this way, without having any claim to offer a homogenous and coherent key of interpretation, or to be particularly original, it could be useful to have a look at some facts of the history of non-contemporary art regarding some ways to look beyond the materiality of the work of art. To show determinate objects, so it doesn’t count as an historical introduction, a sort of “history of art according to us,” but rather as a playful critical hint to highlight the critical course.

 

If we speak exactly about feeling of a loss of references, why we don ‘t remind ourselves of the scene in which Giotto, at the end of the thirteenth century, places the viewer from the “wrong side” with reference to the common senses? If we speak of “avant-garde”,

why don’t we call back the examples of conscious self-affirmations of the artist, as in Lanfranco’s, Wigelmo’s or Antelami’s eulogies in Northern Italy between the end of the eleventh and the beginning of the thirteenth century?

 

When we speak about “iconicity” in today’s art production, and nowadays we abuse this concept without having completely understood it, maybe it is better to keep in our mind a concrete example of Byzantine painting, and of the ways of its mental and visual fruition.

One of the biggest masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance is Piero della Francesca’s Legend of the True Cross, in the church of San Francesco in Arezzo.

 

As we know, the protagonist of the paintings is the sacred wood: born from Adam’s mouth, recognized by the queen of Sheba, hidden by Solomon, collected and employed to crucify the Savior, brought to light from Elena, mother of Constantine, and became the symbol of the new faith and the Christianization of the Roman Empire.

 

This is an event that is repeated and evocated through many other periods, whose main point is a common material that becomes extraordinary because it constitutes the physical object on which the death of God as human, the theological absolute reality of the foundation of Christianity, is carried out.

 

This is the only aim of the history.

 

But there is no crucifixion scene, it is a stage that is skipped, only physically recalled from the painted wooden cross placed on the altar, mentally perceived as the immaterial entity that this pictorial cycle has determined.

 

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