This interesting topic was raised in a Tutor Group Forum in A843. To date I've been puzzled. However, recently I read Ann Gibson's wonderful book on Abstract Expressionism in the USA. This book queries why artists who had a theme or subject, especially one related to their own gender identity, sexual orientation or were marginalised by the canon that favoured (admittedly very great) Painters like Pollock, Rothko and De Kooning. The use of language about language is employed to characterise the difference between:
- 'universal' art whose symbolic value was great but difficult to pin down on any 'local' meaning; and,
- those which indicated themes (by allegory and metonymy) in the artist's life and 'personal politics' and which merged some figures with their abstractions.
She uses the contrast between painted symbols & metaphors in art in cotrast to the allegory (in narrative painting) or metonymy in subject-based topic (Ossorio on his sexual orientation for instance). I find that pretty useful - if not for A843 where it isn't safe to use material not 'on the course'.
All the best
Steve
The PASSAGE below is the one I find most useful - jargon or worth working at:
Mimeticism in art may be likened to narrative, or allegory,
or even metonymy in literature. Like these latter figures, it depends on
contiguity, on touch, following what is “out there,” rather depending for its
connection on the imaginative jump predicated by metaphor or symbol. As Barbara
Kirschenblatt-Gimblett has observed, “The universalizing rhetoric of ‘art’, the
insistence that great works are universal, that they transcend space and time,
is predicated on the irrelevance of contingency.”
It needs to be noted, however, that the representation of any subject matter (freedom just as much
as maternity, transcendence just as much as Catholic or Haiitian ritual) is
tied to some kind of figuration. To privilege symbol and metaphor over the
supposedly more pedestrian allegorical devices of narrative and mimesis, which
depend on metonymy’s contiguous connections, is more an assertion of power than
of intrinsic quality, or even difference, as it may be argued (convincingly I
think), that all metaphor is allegorical at base.
Gibson, A.E. (1997) Abstract
Expression: Other Politics New Haven & London, Yale University Press
p.99.
