Michael Baldwin, Charles Harrison and Mel Ramsden, On Painting — 28-end
“The little contexts that are paintings...”
A&L argue that painting typically possesses an internal complexity “such that it does not reduce to a contextual object” (38); instead, its bounds describe the “little contexts that are paintings” (49). It is, thus, akin to conceptual art in that neither “to wait anxiously for the status of art to be conferred on it [by the institution]” (53). It, therefore, is “capable of resisting the power of the institution” (68).
Conceptualism as criticism
“In the words of Niklas Luhmann, however, ‘If art’s condition is to constantly surpass itself, then eventually there has to be some reflection on art having constantly to surpass itself’. Conceptual Art, perhaps in our specific and admittedly limited understanding of it, can be understood as such a reflection” (57).
See also: http://aamjp.tumblr.com/post/155741472071/michael-baldwin-charles-harrison-and-mel-ramsden
"To go back to the beginning of history, you probably know that there is spoken language and written language, and that there are two kinds of written language, one based on sound and the other on sight." (20)
"The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is CAPABLE of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.
"This is a very unpalatable and bitter doctrine. But I cannot omit it.
"People occasionally develop almost a fanaticism in combating the ideas 'fixed' in a single language. These are generally speaking 'the prejudices of the nation' (any nation).
"Different climates and different bloods have different needs, different spontaneities, different reluctances, different ratios between different groups of impulse and unwillingness, different constructions of throat, and all these leave trace in the language, and leave if more ready and more unready for certain communications and registrations." (34-35)
Dichten = condensare.
I begin with poetry because it is the most concentrated form of verbal expression. Basil Bunting, fumbling about with a German-Italian dictionary found that this idea of poetry as concentration is as old almost as the German language. ‘Dicten’ is the German verb corresponding to the noun ‘Dicjtung’ meaning poetry, and the lexicographer has rendered it by the Italian verb meaning ‘to condense’ (36 // 18-01-17 15:42)
"Rodolfo Agrícola in an edition dating from fifteen hundred and something says one writes: ut doceat, ut moveat ut delectet, to teach, to move or to delight.
"A great deal of bad criticism is due to men not seeing which of these three motives underlies a given composition.
"The converse processes, not considered by the pious teachers of antiquity, would be to obscure, to bamboozle or mislead, and to bore." (66-7)
"The mere questions of constructing and assembling clauses, of parsing and grammar are not enough". A carpenter can put boards together, but a good carpenter knows seasoned wood from green. (73 // 11-01-17 09:35)
"In all cases one test will be, 'could this material have been made more efficient in some other medium?' This statement is simply an extension of the 1914 Vorticist manifesto." (76 // 11-01-17 09:40)
"It is only after long experience that most men are able to define a thing in terms of its own genus, painting as painting, writing as writing. You can spot the bad critic when he starts by discussing the poet and not the poem." See: Art & Language group (84 // 11-01-17 09:51)
"[Chaucer] made fun of hrimm hramm ruff, the decadence of Anglo-Saxon alliteration, the verse written by those who had forgotten the WHY of the Anglo-Saxon bardic narration, and been too insular to learn French. True, Chaucer's name is French and not English, his mind is the mind of Europe, not the mind of an annex or an outlying province.
"He is Le Grand Translateur. He found a new language, he had it largely to himself, without the grand opportunity. Nothing spoiled, nothing worn out." (101 // 16-01-17 13:18)
"The question of using another man's manner or 'style' is fairly simple. Good writing is coterminous with the writer's thought, it has the form of the thought, the form of the way the man feels his thought.
"No two men think in precisely the same way. Mr Wyndham Lewis May have an excellent coat, but it would not give sartorial satisfaction on the back of Mr Joyce, or Mr Elliot, and so in varying degree, until a writer uses a speech of his own, there will be odd bulges, or a slackness over narrower shoulders." (123 // 16-01-17 14:35)
Michael Baldwin, Charles Harrison and Mel Ramsden, On Painting — up to 27
Painting must be understood against a background of events initiated by conceptual art in reaction to modernist painting which more or less excludes it (4-5). It was, if anything, about “not painting” and instead sought to “put texts where paintings had been” through which “a way of thinking about art is invoked and is indexed and then migrates to the walls” (6-7).
But playing with language is playing with a big machine. And playing with language in the context of a tradition of painting is taking on a legacy of powerful descriptions. [...] For us, as Conceptual Art developed into an art of describing, what grew around it was a constituency of interlocutors – listeners and learners as much as speakers and producers. As it turned out, this was a threat to professional securities – for instance to the crucial distinction between artist and critic. But it was also here that the substantial connection was established between Conceptual Art and its syndicalised antecedents in painting. The text may have colonised the physical location of painting, but this text had to mean something – as painting had had to once. It had to be made, and not just be artily found – and the making at issue was a social and conversational pursuit.” (9)
The text within these conceptual ‘paintings’ was, therefore, both in place of the painting and also as “an analogue for the modernist critical text [... which had] come to function prescriptively in respect of that to which it was supposed to be subordinate” [i.e. Clement Greenberg and abstract expressionism]. Baldwin cites Stella’s early paintings as "[throwing] the prescriptive text back at itself, reflecting upon their own status as insolent readings of the rules.” (10)
Painting is problematic for Institutional Theory. The Duchampian readymade and consequent ‘generic’ art relies upon an institutional conferral of its status as art, however “it turns out that paintings have the cheek to look a bit like art whether the art world thinks they do or not” (13-14).
In Joseph Kosuth’s formulation, generic art develops through critical operations on the concept of art; you cannot if you are making painting or sculpture be questioning the concept of art since they are merely fixed kinds of art, i.e., mere subsets of the generic class. In this world, painting is either an authenticist anachronism or it is one postmodern option among many. (17)
[...]
History and historicism are abandoned in favour of a certain simultaneity. The various senses of order, sequentiality and periodicity can thus be abandoned. We are now, it seems, sure that artistic forms are not at all bound to the context of their emergence – and that they do not need to overcome them, for example. We can divorce things from their historical context and put them in any arbitrary combination. (18)
All of this creates a situation in which the institution is empowered to an ever-increasing extent. (20-21)
In the form of the doctrine of indiscernibles, the Institutional Theory argues that the status of art is conferred upon objects by the art world. There are thus still objects that somehow lie ‘behind’ the artwork, however installed, evasive and dematerialised they may be. Here is an instance of Cartesian theatre, the machine behind the artwork’s ghost. Perception and description are pulled apart. In the case of the snow shovel we are supposed to perceive a snow shovel and describe it as a work of art. But in the case of a painting of even minimal internal complexity, our address to it will tend to obliterate a Cartesian object in the background, even if we allow the implicit ontology to linger. (23)
