Research Blog: Entry 9

 In an attempt to corroborate my prior sources with a higher level of scholarly articles, I luckily managed to find a doctoral thesis, “Stuckism, Punk Attitude and Fine Art Practice: Parallels and Similarities (2012)” by Paul Harvey. Although the topic is different from mine, the author’s well researched project offers lots of quotes that can be equally applied to my own thesis. Not only does he offer a balanced argument with criticisms of the movement, but his discussions about the relevance of Stuckist practice within contemporary art provide a valuable resource for my analysis of Remodernism and the works it has produced. These are the relevant sources that I have selected from Harvey’s bibliography:

1. "The Poetist Manifesto (1924)" by Karel Teige: http://cafeirreal.alicewhittenburg.com/pmanifes.htm#summary
2. "Authenticity in Art (2003)" by Denis Dutton: http://denisdutton.com/authenticity.htm
3. "Childish as he wants to be (2010)" by Ben Davis: http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/reviews/davis/billy-childish4-9-10.asp
4. "Did art critics kill RB Kitaj? (2010)" by Jonathan Jones: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2010/jan/08/art-critics-r-b-kitaj
5. "The Stuckists are enemies of art (2009)" by Jonathan Jones: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2009/oct/01/art-stuckist-manifesto
6. "Painted into a corner: are the stuckists right about modern British art? (2011)" by Jonathan Jones: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2011/mar/31/painting-stuckists-modern-british-art
7. "Barzun on the West (2000)" by Roger Kimball: http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Barzun-on-the-West-2631

 The final source that I will be referencing in my thesis is titled, “Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (2011)”. The main goal of Remodernism is based on reapplying the original principles of Modernism, so this comprehensive book on modern art gave is a great source for my academic research. To focus on Remodernism’s yearning ‘towards a new spirituality in art’, I decided to look at passages relating to Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich. Unlike the Stuckists who favour figurative painting as a medium for spirituality, Kandinsky and Malevich expressed their deep spirituality through abstract forms. By comparing their works and writings I hope to explore the different ways that artists embody spiritual depth in their work, and whether non-geometric shapes can provide a material experience that is equal to that of figurative depictions. These quotes are from supportive passages on Kandinsky and Malevich that may be applied to my thesis as substantiation:

Russian formalism (a crisis of reference) (p. 35)

• The polemical target of the Russian Formalist critics was the Symbolist conception that poetry resided in the images it elicited, independent of its linguistic form. But it was through their confrontation with Cubism, then with the first abstract paintings of Kazimir Malevich…that the Russian Formalists discovered, before they ever heard of Saussure, what the Swiss scholar had called the “arbitrary nature of the sign.”

Primitivism (the exotic and the naïve) (p. 66)

• The rule that a step outside a tradition is also a strategy within it holds for the frequent turn to folk art as well–whether it is Gauguin and Breton crucifixes, Wassily Kandinsky and Bavarian glass painting, or Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin and Byzantine icons.
• Here the last word might be given to the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu: “The artist agrees with the ‘bourgeois’ in one respect: he prefers naïveté to ‘pretentiousness.’ 

Abstraction (the initial problems and paradigms across Europe) (pp. 118-124)

• In a famous anecdote Wassily Kandinsky told how…he failed to recognize one of his paintings in the dim light–only to discover the expressive potential of abstract forms through this experience.
• [Absolute meanings of abstraction:] transcendental for Kandinsky, revelatory for Malevich, utopian for Mondrian, and so on.
• Even as [Robert] Delauney atomizes the motif in his color as light, while Malevich darkens it through his eclipse of the sun, both cancel one relation to reality only to affirm another, higher relation, and in this they are joined by others such as Kandinsky and Mondrian for whom abstraction is the apotheosis of the real, not its downfall. They may render the medium opaque, self-evidently material as canvas and paint, but they do so in order to render it transparent again–to feeling, spirit, or purity, all of which these abstractions are asked to signify at one time or another.

Suprematism (deductive structure of figures) (pp. 130-134)

• Malevich’s 1915 Black Cross…are indexical paintings; that is, the division of the picture’s surface, the marks it received, are not determined by the artist’s “inner life” or mood (as was the case for Kandinsky’s abstract paintings), but by the logic of the “zero”–they refer directly to the material ground of the picture itself, which they map.

Cubism (art and science) (p. 311)

• Both Le Corbusier and [Naum] Gabo argue for a new humanism that would be coded in geometric forms, but while the former demands anthropomorphism in art, Gabo conceives of geometric abstraction as the “cornerstone” of his program: “[The Constructive idea] has revealed an universal law that the elements of a visual art such as lines, colours, shapes, possess their own forces of expression independent of any association with the external aspects of the world [and] that their life and their action are self-conditioned psychological phenomena rooted in human nature.”

Monism (eschewing any dualism, any concept of balance) and Tachisme (as expressive) (pp. 561-562)

• For in pre-World War II Europe there had already been what could be called an antitradition of nonrelational art–a tradition for which certain of Malevich’s own works (the Black Square of 1915 and related canvases of the same period), as well as Mondrian’s nine modular grid paintings from 1918 to 1919, constituted essential benchmarks.
• JEP theory and practice were modeled on those of early Kandinsky, who ponderously made detailed, elaborate sketches of so-called “improvisations” that the spectator was to view as faithful portraits of the painter’s “inner being.”

References

Foster, H., Krauss, R., Bois, Y., Buchloh, B. and Joselit, D. (2011). Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism. 2nd ed. London: Thames & Hudson.

Harvey, P. (2012). Stuckism, Punk Attitude and Fine Art Practice: Parallels and Similarities. [online] Northumbria University. Available at: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/8431 [Accessed 03 Jan. 2019].