[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.This will mean that art of this kind does not serve as an illustration of this aesthetic theory, but rather this kind of art serves as a determination or elaboration or an unfolding of these aesthetic ideas, ideas that are themselves derived, at least in part, from art of this kind.So, for example, in contesting Danto’s thesis that the Intractable Avant-Garde passed beyond Kantian aesthetics, above all as evidenced by McCarthy’s Bossy Burger, Gregg Horowitz persuasively argues that even the intractable avant-garde lives off its repudiation of beauty, that art “must continue to abuse beauty … because it cannot quite shed the memory of what beauty promised,”9 viz., a reconciliation of culture and what must be conquered in order for culture to be possible—call it nature, the body, woman, desire.When beautiful semblance becomes not a return of the culturally repressed but a denial of that repression, a champion of cultural order, when form seems to us a lie about justice and harmony (or for Grünewald, spiritual meaning), then art must repudiate aesthetic propriety, as Bossy Burger “repudiates the authority of beautiful art to serve as the proper agent of the repudiated.Where art was, there disgust shall be.”10 Think of this last thought as fully and necessarily temporally indexed: the avant-garde redetermines beauty, harmony, and pleasure into ugliness, formlessness, and disgust—which is how the stakes expressed by the beautiful are transmitted into the present, or, what is the same, how the critical function of horror and anguish in art—from Grünewald to Soutine—come to necessitate, as their proper continuation, something like a critique of art, an anti-art, an overwhelming of the work by affect in order for the critique of deceitful beauty found in earlier art to be sustained.Without an appropriate aesthetic theory one is not going to be able to authoritatively sketch the discontinuous line of development connecting, say, Grünewald to Rembrandt’s The Slaughtered Ox (1655), from there perhaps to some of the uncanny and queasier still lifes, say Chardin’s The Rayfish (1728), till we surface in Van Gogh’s quivering, shuddering canvases, in Soutine’s dead-anddying beasts, in de Kooning’s woman paintings, hence to Cindy Sherman’s horror and inform pictures, and then to McCarthy.11 This line of thought should remind us that Horowitz’s “where art was, there disgust shall be” is not just a narrative operator, but in soldering the connection between beauty and ugliness (ugliness as unredeemed suffering) it reveals a leitmotiv in the development of modern art, the abject counterpoint to its release of beauty.If we were so minded, we could keep Diarmuid Costello happy by including Philip Guston’s “clunky” paintings in the mix, reminding ourselves of how they like other intentionally coarse moments in the avant-garde—art brut or Twombly’s scrawls—also serve as agents for the repudiated, and hence that serving as an agent for what culture repudiates can take a diversity of artistic and aesthetic forms.In which case it is quite right to think of the clunky Gustons as “poignant”—their poignancy an exact acknowledgment of what they have had to forgo for the sake of preserving the memory of reconciliation.Equally however, working from the opposite direction, without these works and series of works shaping our aesthetic responses, modulating the meaning of beauty and ugliness, transience and beauty, horror and anguish, disgust and acknowledgment, and locating all the various formations and deformations of beauty beyond their original bold staking in Kant, aesthetic theory would remain an empty universal, the story of the return of the repressed in art—a tale without variation.My hypothesis is that art history (now) and aesthetics (as the philosophical discourse appropriate to the autonomous art of modernity) are two sides of the same coin: modernism [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]