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Against Design |
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The New Academy |
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Intellection has always played a vital role in art -- in its creation, its evolution, and its appreciation. Never before, however, have intellectual constructs played so dominating a role over visual form as they do today.
At the heart of this domination lies "de-construction" and its proposition that all man-made forms, whether objects or ideas, can be broken down (de-constructed) into parts or "signs," and that these signs are entirely arbitrary in their meaning and value.
Essentially a methodology for existentialism, de-construction is similarly French in origin and in its fascination with the absurd.
It's a set of beliefs that, like the Ready-Made, should have become boring a long time ago. The fact that it endures testifies less to its contribution to human experience than to the vacuum art now finds itself in.
Art landed in this situation for two reasons.
First, the energy supply which motivated and supported "modern art" simply became totally exhausted. Modern art's run from Impressionism to Minimalism, a span of roughly a century and a half, produced some fabulous art. But now it's finished, by as much as a couple of decades.
Into this vacuum steps the second reason art finds itself in a hole: its utter inseparability from academia; a place of the mind; of research, thought, science, and language.
But these are not the fundamentals of art. Perception is the foundation of art, and perception is primarily a sensual experience, not an intellectual one.
As a result, art that originates in the academic, that doesn't base itself first and foremost on the human eye, can do very little; "little" relative to what art has demonstrated to be possible since the paintings in the caves of Lascaux, over 30,000 years ago.
In the 19th century, early modern artists struggled to free themselves and artmaking from a autocratic structure known then, too, as The Academy; specifically, the various European nations' royally sponsored art schools and annual salons, or exhibitions. When these artists finally broke away and launched what we now call "modern art," art of the style they left behind was labeled "academic."
Today, art confronts a new academy in the similarly rigid and restrictive university art system. Its aristocracy consists of its own graduates -- the world's museum directors, curators, critics, art professors, and, of course, artists. It's one big, happy, very closed, very insular family.
What one sees in Against Design
perfectly examplifies this new academic art and this New Academy in
operation.
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