Recent theory has tended to understand the meaning of art primarily
as a function of original contexts of production and reception or
in its relation to fashionable notions of gender, multiculturalism,
and "scopic regimes". These approaches, however, fail to negotiate
adequately art's transhistorical and transcultural significance, a
shortcoming that is particularly serious in relation to
twentieth-century works because it confines their significance to
contexts that are regulated by the specialist interests of a narrow
managerial class of curators, critics, and historians. In this
important book, Paul Crowther provides a radical reinterpretation
of key phases and figures in twentieth-century art, focusing on the
way artists and critics negotiate philosophically significant
ideas.
Crowther begins by discussing how and why form is significant.
Using Derrida's notion of "iterability" -- a sign's capacity to be
used across different contexts -- he links this possibility to key
reciprocal cognitive relations that are the structural basis of
self-consciousness. He then argues that while such relations are
necessarily involved in any pictorial work, they are especially
manifest in aesthetically valuable representation, and even more so
in those twentieth-century works that radically transform or
abandon conventional modes of representation. The involvement of
key reciprocal relations gives such works a transhistorical and
transcultural significance. To show this, Crowther investigates the
theory and practice of important artists such as Malevich, Pollock,
Mondrian, and Newman, and major tendencies such as Futurism,
Surrealism, and Conceptual Art. By linking them to reciprocal
relations, heis able to illuminate a language of twentieth-century
art that cuts across those boundaries set out by such conventional
notions as modern, avant-garde, and postmodern.
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