In this intense and far-reaching book, acclaimed art historian T. J. Clark offers a new vision of the art of the past two centuries, focusing on moments when art responded directly in extreme terms to the ongoing disaster called "modernity". Modernism, Clark argues, was an extreme answer to an extreme condition - the one Max Weber summed up as "the disenchantment of the world"....
In this intense and far-reaching book, acclaimed art historian T. J. Clark offers a new vision of the art of the past two centuries, focusing on moments when art responded directly in extreme terms to the ongoing disaster called "modernity". Modernism, Clark argues, was an extreme answer to an extreme condition - the one Max Weber summed up as "the disenchantment of the world". Clark focuses on instances of maximum stress, when the movement revealed its true nature. The book begins with Jacques-Louis David, painting at the height of the Terror in 1793, then leaps forward to Pissarro a hundred years later, struggling to picture Two Young Peasant Women in a way that agreed with his anarchist politics. Next, the author turns in succession to Cezanne's paintings of the Grand Baigneuses and their coincidence in time (and maybe intention) with Freud's launching of psychoanalysis; to Picasso's Cubism, and to avant-garde art after the Russian Revolution. Clark concludes with a reading of Jackson Pollock's tragic version of abstraction and suggests a new set of terms to describe avant-garde art - perhaps in its final flowering - in America after 1945. Shifting between broad, speculative history and intense analysis of specific works, Clark not only transfigures our usual understanding of modern art, he also launches a new set of proposals about modernity itself.
For a long time, writing this book, I had a way of beginning it in mind. I wanted to imagine modernism unearthed by some of future archaeologist, in the form of a handful of disconnected pieces left over from a holocaust that had utterly wiped out the pieces' context - their history, the family of languages they belongs to, all traces of a built environment.
The questions that followed from the thought-experiment were these. What forms of life would future views reconstruct from this meterial? What idea of the world's availability to knowledge would they reckon the vanished image-makers had operated with? What imaginings of past and future? Or of part and whole? Would it be just the archaeologists' fancy that the surviving images had ruin, void, and fragmentariness already written into th... (查看原文)
太惊我了，两个星期内啃完，还给Kevin. 很有趣的书，but I don't have the strong knowledge context to grasp the whole thing so the reading is more like an accumulation of fragments. 最喜欢的是Pollock和Abstract Expressionism那部分。
0 有用 Adieudusk 2011-09-28 08:35:52
想再找出来看看写塞尚那一部分
1 有用 Hier Tanze 2018-12-12 15:30:48
Clark对Pollock的解读着实精彩。一方面，现代主义艺术不再受制于黑格尔的艺术终结的论断，它通过拒绝对现代社会进行感性再现的方式控诉现代性带来的普遍灾难，并进一步激发人们冲破现存秩序的实践动力；另一方面，“（现代主义艺术）所做的只是想象，只是在冰冷的欺骗的白日梦和在世存在的直接性之间发出绝望而惊人的喊叫。”p10.在一个崇尚资本逻辑的“理智”世界里，艺术自身的感性和非概念化的特点，使得它不仅... Clark对Pollock的解读着实精彩。一方面，现代主义艺术不再受制于黑格尔的艺术终结的论断，它通过拒绝对现代社会进行感性再现的方式控诉现代性带来的普遍灾难，并进一步激发人们冲破现存秩序的实践动力；另一方面，“（现代主义艺术）所做的只是想象，只是在冰冷的欺骗的白日梦和在世存在的直接性之间发出绝望而惊人的喊叫。”p10.在一个崇尚资本逻辑的“理智”世界里，艺术自身的感性和非概念化的特点，使得它不仅无法凭借自己的力量来实现自己的乌托邦理想，甚至没有能力抵御资本主义总体性的吞噬。在这个意义上，现代艺术终将被现代性所终结。这种悲怆的命运正是现代主义的价值所在——“真正使现代主义伟大的“不在于它提供了什么解答，而在于它描绘的文化图景，在那里，解答依然是今天最重要的事。”[ p369.] (展开)
1 有用 21世纪懒汉 2020-04-25 10:58:22
写塞尚那一章很精华，写毕沙罗和无政府主义的一段也很受启发
0 有用 Isis养猩猩 2011-01-29 15:24:19
太惊我了，两个星期内啃完，还给Kevin. 很有趣的书，but I don't have the strong knowledge context to grasp the whole thing so the reading is more like an accumulation of fragments. 最喜欢的是Pollock和Abstract Expressionism那部分。
1 有用 马里兰蓝蟹 2015-03-17 05:41:16
Farewell to Jackson Pollock. The nightmare of art history students.