Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Plates
- Acknowledgements
- Section A Introduction
- Section B Continuum, 1952–1961
- Section C Abundance, 1961–1971
- 1 Arrival in the USA and ‘Clemsville’
- 2 Junk art
- 3 American Pop
- 4 Curator at the Guggenheim
- 5 Six Painters and the Object and Six More, 1963
- 6 Other writings on Pop
- 7 Art as human evidence
- 8 Alexander Liberman and Paul Feeley
- 9 Systemic Painting, 1966
- 10 Abstraction and iconogra
- 11 The communications network
- 12 Departure from the Guggenheim
- 13 Exile in Carbondale
- 14 Arts Magazine
- 15 Arts Magazine
- 16 Return to New York: SVA, SUNY, and The Nation
- 17 Options
- 18 Expanding and disappearing works of art
- 19 Alloway's Nation criticism
- 20 Newness and the avant-garde
- 21 Post-Minimal radicalism
- 22 Historical revisions: Abstract Expressionism and Picasso
- 23 Mass communications
- 24 Film criticism
- 25 Violent America
- 26 Pluralism as a ‘unifying theory’
- Section D Alternatives, 1971–1988
- Section E Summary and Conclusion
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Platesection
20 - Newness and the avant-garde
from Section C - Abundance, 1961–1971
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Plates
- Acknowledgements
- Section A Introduction
- Section B Continuum, 1952–1961
- Section C Abundance, 1961–1971
- 1 Arrival in the USA and ‘Clemsville’
- 2 Junk art
- 3 American Pop
- 4 Curator at the Guggenheim
- 5 Six Painters and the Object and Six More, 1963
- 6 Other writings on Pop
- 7 Art as human evidence
- 8 Alexander Liberman and Paul Feeley
- 9 Systemic Painting, 1966
- 10 Abstraction and iconogra
- 11 The communications network
- 12 Departure from the Guggenheim
- 13 Exile in Carbondale
- 14 Arts Magazine
- 15 Arts Magazine
- 16 Return to New York: SVA, SUNY, and The Nation
- 17 Options
- 18 Expanding and disappearing works of art
- 19 Alloway's Nation criticism
- 20 Newness and the avant-garde
- 21 Post-Minimal radicalism
- 22 Historical revisions: Abstract Expressionism and Picasso
- 23 Mass communications
- 24 Film criticism
- 25 Violent America
- 26 Pluralism as a ‘unifying theory’
- Section D Alternatives, 1971–1988
- Section E Summary and Conclusion
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Platesection
Summary
As we have seen, Alloway was highly receptive to the developments in avant-garde art in the late 1960s. It is crucial, though, if we are to understand Alloway's values fully as well as examining his critical legacy, to realize that newness was not an end in itself, but a means of increasing options. As he once put it, “There's a tendency to celebrate the avant-garde only in terms of its newness. But frequently what the avant-garde is exercising is a ‘time-binding’ function, re-interpreting some traditional aspect of our culture rather than adding a new aspect.” This was a point that came out of his catalogue essay on “Abstract Painting” for the For Concept exhibition at Vassar College Art Gallery in the spring of 1969. Alloway was reassessing “the object-status of conceptual abstract painting” in the light of the move away from painting to, in the case of Minimalism, objects and, with Conceptualism, documents. Compared to conceptual art, abstract painting remained in Walter Benjamin's domain of tradition—“for instance, manual control may not be necessary, but scale, as experienced in the presence of originals only, is essential to the new art.” Painting could also be defined as a class of object:
An abstract painting is both object and emblem. As an object it is culturally mediated (by the history of easel painting) and designed for a special form of close attention. Paintings are not “dumb tools” (Michael Heizer's phrase…), but exist within compact boundaries that separate them, by a shift in the level of coherence, from the space outside. If an abstract painting is not raw material, neither is it significative of absent events (such as a landscape, a mythological incident, or a universalizing belief). However, it does make known a pattern, a rule of organized play, which needs a name; provisionally it could be called emblem, to mean order as manifest within an object's form, so that the object is an example of the order that is proposed.
Alloway is providing a workable conceptual as well as an historical model of painting. This was in opposition to a number of artists and critics at the time who saw painting as an historical discipline that carried with it the baggage of the past.
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- Art and PluralismLawrence Alloway’s Cultural Criticism, pp. 252 - 257Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012