Romanticism, The Fragment, The Wanderer
But what do we mean by ‘to be Romantic’ in this context?
From the latter part of the 18th Century (1700s) there was a paradigmatic shift in cultural behaviour and production, which coincided with vast social and political changes in western societies
Paradigmatic? The Enlightenment. The Industrial Revolution
Social Political Revolution
Freedom for the individual:
No man has received from nature the right to command his fellow human beings. Denis Diderot, L'Encyclopédie, (1751 - 1766)
Man is born free; everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762)
American Revolution (1775-1783)
French Revolution (1789 - 1799)
Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat (1793)
Wegee, Gunman Killed by Off-Duty Cop at 344 Broome St. (1942)
Reality is no longer dictated by the belief in the fixed narratives of Religion and Monarchy. Reality is now dictated by the individual agency in the world. There is a struggle for individual and in turn universal freedom and with this a desire to be reconnected to lived experience in a spiritual and artistic sense.
Value is placed on the artist as an individual. Often a rebel, often a tragically misunderstood genius.
Nan Goldin, Trixie on the Cot, New York City (1979)
Henry Wallis, The Death of Chatterton (1845)
There are fears of technology and its implications in relation to the individual and the natural world. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1823)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epI5r0_T_lE#
Romantic Art vs Classic Art
There is a shift from Classical ideas in the art from symbolic narratives (classical civilisation or religion). Art reflects the edgy, fragmentary experience of the modern individual, engaged in a search for connection in the world.
Caspar David Friedrich, Cross in The Mountains or Tetschen Altar (1808)
With this comes expressions of the overwhelming unknown in nature and the edgy experience of individual agency. The Sublime.
Modern experience as fragmentary, art as a fragment.
[...] photographs, in themselves, are fragmentary and incomplete utterances. Allan Sekula, The Body and the Archive (1986)
Romantic art engages in the notion of the fragment. The fragment points to an imagined whole. Romantic art is the art of becoming, therefore does not aim for a false unity with the past (classical). It rejoices in incompleteness in becoming, in undoing itself– in the journey. This may explain the Romantic fascination in ruins.
Ruins can tell us hi/stories about the past, present and future.
Robert Smithson ‘Ruins in Reverse
The Romantic Wanderer/Photographer
The Claude Glass or Black Mirror
"Suddenly there is a difference between a quaint evocation of the past and an open window looking straight down a stack of decades. The element of time entering into photography provides a departure for as much speculation as an observer cares to make" Walker Evans, The Reappearance of Photography (1931).
Zones of Exclusion Pripyat and Chernobyl
Thinking about the aspects of Romanticism just discussed, can you come up with Romantic examples from contemporary culture, (art or artists)?
