Rational Transcendence
The Art world has been trying to name itself as a movement for the last one hundred and thirty years to no avail. All of the terms we use to describe artistic activity for that period seem to fall short. In that span, there have been about as many movements as there have been significant artists. History shows us that after time, all the small innovations and minor discoveries really fall into three major categories; The Leap, an intuitive break from the past, The Classical, a refinement and age of constant discovery, and eventually, for lack of a better term, The “Istic”, a continuance of the high period where nothing more can be really done except embellishment. This cycle will be of interest to us later as we try to determine where we now stand historically.
As for what Age we are in right now, we can only begin by the process of elimination and where the Intuitive leap first took place. Right off, we will eliminate the term Modern. Every Artist from the time of artistic self-awareness has considered their work modern. It is the very nature of the term. Wasn’t Praxitilies’ work more modern than the first Archaic sculpture produced in Greece? Wasn’t Raphael more modern than Massacio? We can make this argument ad infinitum, so, to call ourselves Modern is to totally misuse the word. When will we no longer be Modern, but Post-Modern? Will we then become Uber-modern? When will future artists be allowed to be modern? Or will they be relegated to Neo-Modern? Therefore we will terminate the usage of both Modern and Post-Modern, the later being a totally absurd concept.
Another ridiculous term would be Deconstructivist. All artists deconstruct the work done by previous generations and rebuild it into either a new direction or possibly even a great leap. All Art is built on the foundation of the dialogue started 25,000 years ago. It is dissected, ingested and then born new with modernist tendencies. Braque and Picasso deconstructed Cezanne, added primitive sculpture, and understood the ideas of relativity and tried to translate that into the two-dimensional picture plane. Cezanne deconstructed the Neo-Classical and Realist painters into the cone, the sphere and the cube, added impressionist theories and was considered a lunatic. Jackson Pollack deconstructed all of painting and it resulted into what we consider Color Field. But didn’t Malevich really do that in 1912 with “White on White?”
The American painters of the 1940’s and 50’s became Abstract Expressionists. This is another all inclusive term which could be one to be used to describe the entire era, except for two major semantic reasons. Firstly, all art is abstraction. It’s just the nature of translating life into art. Even the most photographically realistic portrayal of any image is automatically an abstraction. Secondly, all Art, whether spelled with a capital A or not, is an expression. Therefore, all Art, from the beginning of time is Abstract Expressionism.
Reductivism might fit as Cezanne tried to reduce painting elements down to the three basic drawing shapes and it did in the end lead to Minimalism. However, it is hard to ignore major trends such as Expressionism, Dada and Surrealism, let alone, Conceptual Art, which in many cases requires three pages of written explanation to convey the intellectual thought involved.
The Age of Relativity seemed to work just as a dividing line between the Newtonian age and our New Order. Sam Hunter and John Jacobus in Modern Art, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1958), 148 write “By devaluing subject matter, or by monumentalizing simple, personal themes, and by allowing mass and void to elide, the Cubists gave effect to the flux and paradox of modern life and the relativity of its values.” As Art is a dialogue, both linear and free-form, it is relative to all Art made from the beginning of time from all sources and seems to describe all Art as opposed to just ours. There is also the unfortunate reference to Einstein’s equation that applies to advanced physics and the Space-Time Continuum. We will keep it in mind, as we know historically; Artistic and Scientific advancements have a certain interaction.
In my egotistical quest to champion a term to save us all from modernism, I fell in love with the term Psychogenicism. The dictionary defines it as (a) Originating in the mind or in mental or emotional processes; having a psychological rather than a physiological origin, or (b) the origin of physical or psychological states, normal or abnormal, out of the interplay of conscious and unconscious psychological forces. Cezanne intellectualized the idea of reducing the drawing elements and then used interplay of conscious and unconscious methods to invent. Much the same way Duchamp spoke of his Art being more formulated in the viewers mind for completion as opposed to a reflection of physicality or hallucination. As a term, it seemed to fit all the variations of our time. Unfortunately in a broader sense, it fits all Art from the beginning of time in much the same way as Expressionism.
Many times when we seek to encompass many elements into one definitive statement, certain aspects protrude, never quite fitting the overall definition. This is true when trying to make Surrealism and Dada fit all the equations above. At one point the term Surrealism was a candidate, but its confusion with the movement and the manifesto put forth by Andre Breton in 1924 narrowed it’s meaning and eliminated much of Art from our period of concern. “…the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality…” However, while reading a text by Patrick Frank entitled, Prebles’ Artforms, Ninth Edition, 2009, page 403, I was struck by a statement he wrote about the Surrealists. “…the Surrealists sought to expand consciousness by transcending the limits of rational thought.” Isn’t this exactly what Cezanne was trying to do? He combined Realism and Neo-Classicism, two of the most rational ideas in Art, the first descriptive, the second structural and moved Art into a realm where objects no longer needed to reflect reality but could be delineated to express structural content that eliminated Renaissance Space. It was the first manifestation of Rational Transcendence in Art.
To sort out the visual dialogue leading to the changes in the art condition since the Renaissance. Redefining of the parameters of Art and twentieth century works that define, the misnamed, Post Modern and replace it with the term Post Renaissance.
