Category: CORE course

PRESENTATION—Joseph Beuys—The Pack

The last day spent in College included our Lab session, in which we were asked to work in pairs producing a presentation on a work of art selected from the tate collection.

The partnerships were chosen randomly, by drawing names out of a hat, and I was paired with my colleague Ian Evans. There were four sets of two artworks, and one set was assigned to each pair of presenters (again, randomly). We received Joseph Beuys’ The Pack 0f 1969, and John Baldessari’s Hope (Blue) Supported by a Bed of Oranges (Life): Amid a Context of Allusions of 1991.

We were originally drawn to Baldessari’s work, but in a negative sense as he was an artist we each knew little about, but we soon reverted to Beuys – as much as we had distinct problems with his work, there just seemed to be more get your teeth into with him.

Baldessari’s work, on our (rather superficial) inspection, seemed to have little to say outside of its immediate context (which of course would probably be the point, and very typical of the art of his time). In itself the piece seems to deal with montage and collage, filmic references, the play of meaning of loose referents, it has some formal elements that could also be interpreted or connected to other works, as well as the piece’s own position within the development of Baldessari’s oeuvre.

Beuys, on the other hand, afforded a veritable cornucopia of material to work with.

The presentation itself was organized along our own particular areas of interest. Ian concentrated on the social and political aspects of the work, for which I have little interest, and I took the formal and museological direction.

The Pack by Joseph Beuys, on display at the tate Modern
Presentation by Ian Evans and Edward Sanderson
Goldsmiths College 14 December 2006
Recording – 20mins (Ogg Vorbis format – 15.7MB)

Postscript

While working on the presentation, I was drawn to the presentation of the piece itself and started working through some analyses of the tate’s displays in relation to Beuys works from the Collection. Near the end of the recording there is a section on the positioning of The Pack and it’s relation to the audience and the audience’s relation back to the piece.

There was a lot that I looked into on this subject that wasn’t relevant to the presentation, given the time constraints, but I realised that this was something that really interested me and that I’d like to work up into a new post here, on the blog.

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COLLEGE—First term essays

I’ve been a bit quiet recently, apart from some exhibition notices, because I’ve had two essays to hand in, as well as a joint presentation to present.

The essays are the first pieces of writing I’ve had to do for the various courses which make up the diploma I’m on. They aren’t assessed, but they are marked, and they are designed to judge and give us feedback on our writing without destroying our grades. For this reason they’re called ‘diagnostic essays’.

This doesn’t stop them being very stressful to do, though. I’d rather not create a bad impression at this stage through a poor piece of writing. Although you could always say that it makes the final, assessed essay that much better looking if you are mediocre at this stage.

All but one of these essays have now been done and returned so I have a pretty good idea of how I’m doing and pointers to what to improve.

CORE Course essay (2,000 words)

For the Core course I wrote a piece on the Daniel Buren show at Modern Art Oxford, starting from the premise that I was disappointed with the show and how I felt that his work was now outdated with respect to current art practices in the arena of Institutional Critique. Picking up on a specific ‘conversation’ between Buren and the artist Olafur Eliasson, and looking back at some pieces by Buren that I considered to be successful, I tried to review my disappointment and come to some conclusions for the continued relevance of Buren’s work.

My tutor (Astrid Schmetterling) was generally positive about the piece, although she pointed out that I had omitted to mention the current ‘relational’ art practices as possibly superseding Buren’s work. The major complaint against my writing was that my discussion of Buren’s critique was not thorough enough, I never really explained what it was that the pieces I described were designed to do and hence how that related.

Download essay (PDF 3.4MB)

Score: 64/100*

Framing Art essay (1,000 words)

For this (very) short essay I chose from a selection of provided questions. These were really for the longer essay that we will do at the end of the course (8,000 words) but served as a convenient starting point for this shorter one. The piece I wrote dealt with the question:

Considering the importance of the fragment in John Soane’s Museum, can one say that his house is more about the use-value of art (its function as a collectible commodity) than its aesthetic value?

and swiftly discussed fragments as a concept, various examples of them, and how Soane, his contemporaries and a present day audience perceive and make use of them.

Overall the essay was well received by the tutor, John-Paul Martinon, with its clarity being particularly praised. However criticisms included the fact that no proper argument was proposed, mainly due to the fact that I had not concentrated on one or two sources, with which I could then participate in an argument, rather than present my own personal views along with a collection of opposing views with no form of engagement with them.

This is a new concept for me and it is taking me a while to understand the significance of it and it’s practical ramifications.

The other criticism was the speed with which I dealt with the topics, which led to generalisations raising more questions than they answered. It was suggested that concentrating on a couple of objects as exemplars would have served me better.

Download the essay (PDF 36KB)

Score: 66/100*

Conclusion

I was expecting much worse and bored my colleagues endlessly about how badly I was going to do, to the extent that I promised to buy them all coffee if I got less than 65 for the Framing Art essay.

So on the whole not bad, but not good either, and certainly not good enough if I wish to apply for funding for an MA next year – for that I would need a first. Much work to do over the next term.

The next essay deadline is for the remaining course, ‘Philosophy and…’, and which is due on the 17 of January and which I will be writing over the Christmas holiday. After that it’s time to start writing the extended, assessed essays due at the end of the Spring term.

  • * A score of 70 or more is a first.

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WRITING—The Idea in Art

Picking up on another subject from the previous post, touched on in this quote:

. . . the [late nineteenth-century] avant-garde saw the necessity of an escape from ideas, which were infecting the arts with the ideological struggles of society.1

What’s interesting to me, upon re-reading that passage, is the denigration of ideas as ‘infecting the arts with the ideological struggles of society’, which is precisely (it seems to me) where certain strands of conceptual art took art in the late ’60’s – looking particularly at Adrian Piper.

On the course we are looking at Greenberg along with Clive Bell’s The Aesthetic Hypothesis (1914) and Roger Fry’s An Essay in Aesthetics (1909) as the developers of formalism in art theory in the early twentieth-century. So I reviewed the texts we are reading by them for other instances of the subordination of ideas, but it seems that for Bell and Fry it goes without saying and so there are only oblique references to it.

Clive Bell:

. . . for the purposes of aesthetics we have no right, neither is there any necessity, to pry behind the object, into the state of mind of him who made it.

For to appreciate a work of art we need bring nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions. Art transports us from the works of man’s activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation.

To appreciate a work of art we need bring nothing but a sense of form and colour and a knowledge of three-dimensional space.

But if in the artist an inclination to play upon the emotions of life is often the sign of a flickering inspiration, in the spectator a tendency to seek, behind form, the emotions of life is a sign of defective sensibility always.2

Roger Fry:

It is only when an object exists in our lives for no other purpose than to be seen that we really look at it . . . and towards such even the most normal person adopts to some extent the artistic attitude of pure vision abstracted from necessity.

We must therefore give up the attempt to judge the work of art by its reaction on life, and consider it as an expression of emotions regarded as ends in themselves.3

Being prior to the development of conceptual art, Fry and Bell’s judgments are historically tied to an understanding of art as object based, so their concept of ‘idea’ seems to be one of subject-matter. Conceptual art on the other hand conceived of the idea as something that isn’t necessarily represented, so the return of the idea, post-Greenberg, was not a return to a previous practice, but a new way of doing art.

  1. Greenberg, C.(1940). Towards a Newer Laocoon. In Frascina F., eds. Pollock and After: The Critical Debate. London: Routledge, 1985.
  2. Bell, C.(1914). The Aesthetic Hypothesis. In Frascina F. and Harrison C., eds. Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology. London: Paul Chapman Publishing, 1982.
  3. Fry, R.(1909). An Essay in Aesthetics. In Frascina F. and Harrison C., eds. Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology. London: Paul Chapman Publishing, 1982.
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WRITING—The Self-Critical Tendency in Art

Conceptual art’s move beyond Modernism’s implicit self-criticism to one of overt self-criticism.

In 1965, Clement Greenberg was continuing to promote the Modernist ‘project,’ stressing the internal nature of the self-critical tendency in art:

I identify Modernism with the intensification, almost the exacerbation, of this self-critical tendency.

The Enlightenment criticized from the outside, the way criticism in its more accepted sense does; Modernism criticizes from the inside, through the procedures themselves of that which is being criticized.

It should also be understood that the self-criticism of Modernist art has never been carried on in any but a spontaneous and subliminal way. It has been altogether a question of practice, immanent to practice and never a topic of theory.1

Whereas, at the same moment artists were already examining this process and deliberately exploiting it for it’s own ends. Adrian Piper, as an early practitioner of what came to be called Conceptual art, describes her own rationalisation of the process thus:

. . . I coined the term meta-art in 1972 to describe a kind of writing an artist may do about her work that examines its processes and clarifies its sociopolitical context and conceptual presuppositions from the first-person perspective . . . this brand of art criticism is incompatible with the myth that the critic may impersonally efface herself and her subjectivity in order more accurately to deliver objectively valid pronouncements about the criticized object.2

And Conceptual art’s emphasis on the idea mirrors Greenberg’s historicisation of Abstract art’s move to the rejection of ideas for forms:

. . . the [late nineteenth-century] avant-garde saw the necessity of an escape from ideas, which were infecting the arts with the ideological struggles of society. Ideas came to mean subject matter in general. (Subject matter as distinguished from content: in the sense that every work of art must have content, but that subject matter is something the artist does or does not have in mind when he is actually at work.) This meant a new and greater emphasis upon form . . .3

Which leads him on to the development of his theory of the medium as the determining factor in abstract art, the ‘idea’ is not mentioned again, but it’s interesting to see how it has become subordinated in Greenberg’s account.

  1. Greenberg, C.(1965). Modernist Painting. In Frascina F. and Harrison C., eds. Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology. London: Paul Chapman Publishing, 1982.
  2. Piper, A.(1997). Introduction: Some Very FORWARD Remarks. In Piper, A., Out of Order, Out of Sight Vol 1: Selected Writings in Meta-Art 1968–1992. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1997.
  3. Greenberg, C.(1940). Towards a Newer Laocoon. In Frascina F., eds. Pollock and After: The Critical Debate. London: Routledge, 1985.
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