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.
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lost
I am fairly sure that we are talking at cross purpose here.I have no problem with the use of academic language I just have to read things with a dictionary , it does not mean I object to the language.
About your article here though I cannot see that it argues one way or another for the vocabulary used unless you are saying that certain words , eg. mnemetic , are appropriated by particular groups and excludes others which I do not see. Also I definitely do not think that we are discussing jargon , jargon is specific and most of the words we have discussed are borrowed from other disciplines not owned by art history/ critcism.
hope the essay is going well
Lucy
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Hi Lucy
I think you are right that we aren't arguing from different corners here - but I'm sorry if I got you wrong (that wasn't intended).
I think the point Gibson wants to make is that Pollock and Rothko promoted a sense of 'pure art' or the 'transcendent' or 'universal (I believe Rothko refused to teach anything else but 'pure art'). She argues that this led to the marginalisation of Black painters, whose abstractions also conveyed thought about representation of figures from the lived world - like Rose Piper (you'd love her work I'm sure). I wish I could find some to send you.
As for the EMA, it is slow and painful!!!!!!
I hope yours is singing away, though!
Steve