There are a number of thoughts that spring to my mind when I look back on last Thursday's lecture on painting. A lot of the paintings we looked at seemed to show a self-awareness of painting, like with Neil Jenney's Husband and Wife, and Ben Reeves work. Also, with Douglas Coupland, and with the Emma Lake series by Kim Dorland, the work is a reference back to art history, other artworks, and other aspects of the art world. Especially since I'm guessing most of the painting we looked at can be described as modernist, this really strongly reminds me of the modernist period in literature (surprise!). I've been working on a research paper which is partially about the modernist period, and when I made the connection, I was particularly thinking of how or anthology talks about modernist art and literature as having "turned inward", becoming self-referential, inter-textual, and cannibalistic (Damrosch 928). Of course it makes sense that art and literature from the same period would have similar things going on, it was just kind of a light-bulb moment for me.
Re-visiting a topic I wrote about a couple of blog posts ago, "what is art?", it's really interesting to compare modern or contemporary art with the art from, say the first half of the art history survey course. It seems like the function of art--painting specifically, has changed, or at least loosened to be used for so many more purposes. In the seventeen and eighteen hundreds it seems to me that painting was used for representation, for the sake of beauty, and often for political or religious purposes. In the modern period (and obviously this has something to do with the advent of photography) I feel like painting is also used for these purposes, but in so much of a broader sense and with such diverse and different approaches. Along with the rest of art, painting is accomplishing so much in such unique ways. The modern period is crazy.
"The 21st Century. " Ed. Damrosch, David. The Longman Anthology of British Literature. 921-942.
Re-visiting a topic I wrote about a couple of blog posts ago, "what is art?", it's really interesting to compare modern or contemporary art with the art from, say the first half of the art history survey course. It seems like the function of art--painting specifically, has changed, or at least loosened to be used for so many more purposes. In the seventeen and eighteen hundreds it seems to me that painting was used for representation, for the sake of beauty, and often for political or religious purposes. In the modern period (and obviously this has something to do with the advent of photography) I feel like painting is also used for these purposes, but in so much of a broader sense and with such diverse and different approaches. Along with the rest of art, painting is accomplishing so much in such unique ways. The modern period is crazy.
"The 21st Century. " Ed. Damrosch, David. The Longman Anthology of British Literature. 921-942.
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