Smart History
Just because I haven’t been posting doesn’t mean I haven’t been working, thinking, researching, that sort of thing. Martin Heidegger suggested that we knew there was such a thing as art because we could find things which we recognized as art works. A kind of circular logic that was hard to argue with and tended to make your head hurt, particularly when you had to start defining things like thing before you could really get going. I believe we’ve progressed some, as we now know that there is such a thing as art because there are things made by people called artists. Heidegger touches on this, but it was early and he couldn’t really imagine where things were headed.
I just discovered a new website called Smarthistory which brings all this into focus. If you follow this link you can hear two obviously knowledgeable people enthusing about “Untitled” by Eva Hesse; there’s also a picture which will bring context to their discussion. The problem I have is that if this particular Untitled been made by someone other than a real artist, you or I for instance, and it hadn’t been framed by a museum none of this would make much sense. (I don’t mean that the museum actually framed this, that would obviously missed large part of the conceptual point, but rather that the museum itself acts as a frame which makes the discourse possible.) I mean Untitled is nice enough, but then as Marcel Duchamp noticed so are a lot of things.
I am so glad you like Smarthistory.org (and Heidigger). You raise interesting points and I thought I would chime in. MoMA is a huge frame of course; you ask what if Hesse’s Untitled had been made by someone who was not a real artist (by artist do you mean someone who set’s out to be framed by a place such as MoMA?). For me the answer is that an object such as untitled could not be made by a none-artist. I don’t mean winding cord, but rather the ideas embedded in the winding.
in some strange sense I agree with you completely. It is the ideas embedded in the winding, which is another way to say the art historical context. I don’t have an objection to this, in fact I kind of enjoy it, but there’s a whole other question I’m struggling with concerning those who don’t share this knowledge or context. Is there some quality of work that speaks to them without the necessity of frame?
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Менеджер по работе с клиентами Just because I haven’t been posting doesn’t mean I haven’t been working, thinking, researching, that sort of thing…..