Aa Is for Aesthetic (RLE Edu K) by Peter Abbs;

Author:Peter Abbs; [Abbs, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781136495236
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

And this, even more tellingly, is the artist Schoffer:

Contemporary painting and sculpture don't interest me. Can you imagine anyone nowadays building a factory for the construction of horse-drawn carriages? Of course not! Well it's the same with art: brushes were all right for painting and mallets for sculpture between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. 15

Naively, and without question, the artist assumes that there must be a parallel between technology and art: that as one progresses from the horse-drawn carriage to the motorcar, so must the other possess a comparable linear forward thrust. The past, it is assumed, can tell us nothing; all that we need is given in the present and, moreover, whatever we do it must represent ‘progress’, be the aesthetic extension and fulfilment of all that has gone before. The power of such an assumption can be registered if we consider the unconditional praise which is locked in the word ‘progressive’ when applied to the arts, and the unmitigated opprobrium connected with the word ‘reactionary’ to define a person who has the blindness to oppose the latest expression of the artistic avant-garde.

It would require a volume to show how the concept of progress has affected the arts. Within a restricted context, the word can, of course, be meaningfully applied: an artist does progress in his work, a movement can also be seen to develop and become more complex in the course of time … But applied indiscriminately, the notion of inevitable progress can culminate in an appalling shallowness of mind which yet has the audacity to regard itself as the ultimate development in culturalmatters. It can encourage a profound ignorance of the past, locking man into the narrow provincialism of the merely contemporary. It can make us defenceless before the tyranny of fashion and the whim of the instant moment. It can result in art colleges where the traditional techniques of drawing are not transmitted and where students can leave with little more than an ability to make a line across a map, play kinetic tricks with black and white paint, and chant pseudo-revolutionary platitudes. For these reasons it is well to be aware that there is no unambiguous linear development in the arts. One movement cannot be collapsed into another and given an evolutionary explanation. Art can regress as well as progress. It can also stagnate. Furthermore, the value of art is not in some abstract development historically conceived, but in the unique individual works of artists which, as we respond to them in all their specificity, impart their vision.

I have argued that inevitable progress and pure objectivity are misplaced categories in art discourse. There is one further related misconception, which again I think derives from the scientific and technological domain. There is a prevailing notion that any object or event can be constituted a work of art. Otto Hahn, the proponent of objective art already mentioned, celebrates ‘a literal, factual art’, ‘a physical art’ in which ‘the illusion of the event is replaced by the event itself’ But art cannot be literal, cannot dispense with the illusion, and remain art.

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