critical
Fifth, there was modernism’s grand teleology — the whack-rationalist idea that history was to proceed in a predefined order. If you didn’t fit, know, or care, or were a visionary, an artist of color, or female, tough luck. Only the things in its timeline were deemed progress. Progress was to be the goal of all art.
What Does the New MoMA Mean for Modernism? And What Was Modernism Anyway?
But in general, the story was one of rigid progression that looked, on the museum walls, almost inevitable. Which is exactly as the museum intended: An institution that came of age at the imperial height of the American Century, funded during the Cold War in part with CIA money meant to exalt and export a showcase of free expression (sometimes... See more
What Does the New MoMA Mean for Modernism? And What Was Modernism Anyway?
If modernism wasn’t the end point of art history and the ultimate form of artistic expression, then what was it? If we don’t let it bully its way to the front of the line and center stage, crowding out everything that came before, during, and whatever comes after, what does it look like? And what will it look like as it recedes farther and farther... See more
What Does the New MoMA Mean for Modernism? And What Was Modernism Anyway?
... See moreAn image is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced, it is an appearance, or a set of appearances, which has been detached from the place and time in which it first made its appearance and preserved - for a few moments or a few centuries. Every image embodies a way of seeing. Even a photograph. For photographs are not, as is often assumed, a
... See moreLa vista llega antes que las palabras. El niño mira y ve antes de hablar.
Pero esto es cierto también en otro sentido. La vista es la que establece nuestro lugar en el mundo circundante; explicamos ese mundo con palabras, pero las palabras nunca pueden anular el hecho de que estamos rodeados por él. (…)
Lo que sabemos o lo que creemos afecta al modo
The political point of feminist art history must be to change the present by means of how we re-represent the past. That means we must refuse the art historian’s permitted ignorance of living artists and contribute to the present-day struggles of living producers.
... See moreFeminist thought has never meant limiting women to the study of women's issues. Thus feminist work in and on art history is not just about the restitution of women artists to official histories (…). It must mean broadening the entire field of intellectual endeavour to acknowledge the significance of sexual and other differences amidst the play of
... See more(…) it is not useful to aim merely to correct the oversights and ignorance that led art history to ignore the art of almost all women who have participated in creative cultural activity. Such a short-sighted, if always necessary objective swings the issue of gender over onto the artists who are women having to make their case for re-incorporation
... See moreIt was Rozsika Parker' s and my opening salvo, Old Misttesses: Women, Art and ldeology, in 1981, that /irst tracked what we could now call, pace Fredric ]ameson, 'the political unconscious' of art history as a discursive formation institutionalized in museum and academy in the twentieth century. We argued that despite art's deceptive marginality in