Art Then Technology (Part 5): Abstract Art Is A Technology.

Fat Bastard: end of third day of installation.
(Return to Part 4)

As a participant in an exhibition of abstract 'generative' art called abstrakt - Abstrakt, I spent nine days installing, and had a lot of time to think about the work of the other artists in the show, most of whom used or addressed the crumbling edge of digital technology, and almost all of whom evoked for me the flatfooted logic of the last great wave of abstract art, 1960s era minimalism. My work is sometimes describes as post-minimalist. I like to describe it as post-Star Wars-minimalism, but not because it's high-tech. My art is not-at-all-crumbling edge; I use no advanced technology, my design and fabrication is entirely analog, but by the time I became aware of abstraction, Modernism had been recast as the Deathstar and destroyed. Abstract artist of my generation are "late-adopters." Late adopter is a term usually reserved for technologies. My decision to take up abstraction in the mid-1990s was because abstraction is not a style, that the difference between abstract art and earlier art is not a difference in quality, it is a difference in kind. But it has only been as I've been thinking about exactly what technology is that it occurred to me that the difference is the difference between a very old technology and a relatively new one.

The Killing Fields (Part 4/4): Rosalind Krauss is Dead

Valerie Jaudon, Yazoo City (1975); Barnett Newman, Broken Obelisk (1963); Valerie Jaudon, installation photo (1977)

The feminist art historian Anna Chave is critical of Michel Foucault's idea of power and it is not hard to imagine why. For most of history, in most peoples minds power has been almost wholly associated with the masculine - up to and including Chaves own historic moment. For instance, in his widely read 1972 book Ways of Seeing, John Berger began an essay on the female nude in the European oil painting tradition as follows: 

According to usage an convention which are at last being questioned but by no means been overcome, the social presence of woman is different in kind from that of a man. A man's presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies. If the promise is large and credible his presence is striking. If it is small or incredible, he is found to have little presence... By contrast, a woman's presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her... One might simplify by saying men act and women appear. Men Look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

Judging by his tone, Berger seems to have sincerely believed he was outside the "usage and convention" he was commenting on, but all the same he comes across as very much a man of his time, when he writes, "If a woman makes a good joke this is an example of how she treats the joker in herself and accordingly of how she as a joker-woman would like to be treated by others. Only a man can make a good joke for its own sake."

The Killing Fields (Part 3/4): Killing Rosalind Krauss

Death and the Maiden: Rosalind Krauss, Ingmar Bergman,s The Seventh Seal, Clement Greenberg

The reason Clement Greenberg was inconsistent on the subject of sculpture is because in constructing his formalist theories he had conceptually painted himself into a corner. He insisted that the ideas in  Modernist Painting were never intended to be prescriptive, but he had successfully mapped a generation worth of artistic production, starting with Frank Stella's black painting (which he evidently didn't much like), right up through to the minimalist (who he down right disliked), and dribbling out among the earth artists (those guys were totally formalists - see PMD 2/3). That is no small achievement, even accounting for the mixed results (in Greenberg's opinion). His rejection of minimalism wasn't arbitrary - he clearly hoped to extend his influence for another decade or two.