Page 18 - Attila Konnyu

This wisdom is taken further by Matisse and the Fauves. Color comes to be used independently of natural appearance, it becomes arbitrary it has no delity to the object. This guarantees the autonomy of the pigment in order to achieve real autonomy of the painting. The whole activity of organizing the canvas lies in placing pigments next to each other and how it makes us feel. Objectness is rejected. Formal complexity of organization reveals unexpected harmony for a viewer and reductionism eliminates everything that tends the viewer see a narrative (he eliminates illusionism, puts everything on the same plane, eliminates demarcation lines in order to create greater drama by laying pigments next to each other) and these are, of course, the two principal characteristics of “l’art pour l’art”.
In the next stage Magritte in his Dadaist painting “Ceci n’est pas une pipe!” creates a con ict: painting of a pipe saying it is not a pipe. Why is that? These are shape, color, recapitulation of lines of light and dark brown - they are the ones in consideration. The artist uses an imperative. There are two realities running simultaneously here - representational and non-representational. With this he creates cognitive dissonance. What is authentic in this case is a painting of parallel colors. The painting is highly didactic in providing a new orthodoxy - in reaching for pure painting.
And, of course, in his ‘Fountain’ of 1913 (the urinal readymade), Duchamp creates the struggle by cognitive dissonance that leads the viewer to understand the authentic - shape, color, lines that are in consideration.
But Duchamp presents here yet another idea - that if artist’s work is to assemble the material into a piece of artwork it may as well be a ready made one. He shows that the creation of art does not have to involve manual activity, but can be a matter of making choices. His work is proto-conceptual.
It must be said that the demand for removing imitativeness, for pure abstraction, existed in literature as well. Gustave Flaubert in his letter of 1852-53 had written: “...what I should like to write is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the strength of its style.”
At the same time in Philosophy - Sartre in his ‘Nausea’ speaks about looking at an object without point of reference in order to see no meaning in it. (The point of reference would be social designation of language or something utilitarian.)
And so in the beginning of 20th century the question is raised if art can be absolute as music, that means a self contained system that doesn’t rely on representation, a system of line, form, shape, color. Art self-referential.
In Russia appears Kasimir Malevich who disdained imitation of nature and traditional iconography and decided to create new realities outside of nature. Suprematist composition: ‘White on White’ painted c.1918 is founded on straight line, supremely elemental form, and square - which is not found in nature. It conveys supremacy of mind over matter.
Apparently it was a simple matter. What was demanded was set of rules. And in 1910 Mondrian and DeStijl set rules for ‘pure art’. It is based on structure of only rectangle and square, it is only two dimensional, and it uses only primary colors red, yellow, blue and non-colors black, white, gray, so it does not refer to anything in nature. All elements have equal representative value and therefore are simultaneously true in presenting themselves as positive or negative space, or both and therefore there is an in nite astonishing number of combinations.
If we have forty elements we get forty factorial possible combinations. The whole interpretation is within the structure. Mondrian strives for a perfect moment of line, form, color without illusion. Just as Arnulf Schoonberg does, who developed tonality limited to twelve speci c tones, where twelve notes within an octave are treated as equal, they are subjected to an ordered relationship, so it is unlike the major and minor key system, there is no hierarchy of note; the twelve notes are related only to one another, it creates underlined tonality through ostensibly atonal music that does not form a melody.
After the World War II when the art scene moves to another continent for reasons obvious, in Abstract Expressionism individual gesture through the brushstroke as a constituent element becomes autonomous. Jackson Pollock’s marks on canvas are the record of the artist’s characteristic physical gestures. Gesture expresses his emotions at the time of painting but also his whole personality. It borrows technique of automatism from surrealists (using brush without rational control). This “action painting” describes an arena in which the artist acts. It calls for freedom from traditional social and aesthetic values. By now when the conscious viewer gets to Rothko’s color eld painting, ‘Orange on Orange’ for example, he or she can understand that it is a provision of the study of three
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