Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction: Art's Philosophy – Bergson and Immanence
- Part I Bergson, Art, History
- 1 Bergson, History and Ontology
- 2 Art History, Immanently
- 3 Art History, Less Its Conditions of Possibility: Following Bergson's ‘Le Possible et le réel’
- 4 Matisse, Bergson, Oiticica, etc.
- 5 Bergson Before Deleuze: How to Read Informel Painting
- 6 Revolutionary Immanence: Bergson Among the Anarchists
- Part II Unconditional Practice
- Part III Immanence of the Visible
- Afterword: An Art Historical Return to Bergson
- Index
4 - Matisse, Bergson, Oiticica, etc.
from Part I - Bergson, Art, History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction: Art's Philosophy – Bergson and Immanence
- Part I Bergson, Art, History
- 1 Bergson, History and Ontology
- 2 Art History, Immanently
- 3 Art History, Less Its Conditions of Possibility: Following Bergson's ‘Le Possible et le réel’
- 4 Matisse, Bergson, Oiticica, etc.
- 5 Bergson Before Deleuze: How to Read Informel Painting
- 6 Revolutionary Immanence: Bergson Among the Anarchists
- Part II Unconditional Practice
- Part III Immanence of the Visible
- Afterword: An Art Historical Return to Bergson
- Index
Summary
I will venture to put forward – in the form of a short-circuit – this unique proposition: there is no immanence other than that which always constructs on a plane that is never bequeathed and whose plurality depends strictly on the displacement of problems in function of forces susceptible to radicalising its expression in the present imperative. The projection of a ‘Bergsonian paradigm of immanence’ in the field of art, taken at its very first historic inscription (in Matisse, in Fauvism), is such a small exception to this that it is the very notion of the aesthetic that finds itself radically problematised in a Critique and a Clinique of Art. Or rather, to phrase it in a sharper manner: the aesthetic is problematised in a clinical Critique of the Art-Form that refers less to a ‘new Bergsonism’ and more to a Bergson Oltre Bergson, whose alterity would crystallise the most intimate within his thought (his critique of Form) with its absolute outside (in the form of a Clinique of Art placed outside himself). This, I will develop abruptly, with one shot, in ‘Matisse, Bergson, Oiticica, etc.’.
Matisse – how can we approach what appears to me as the untimely singularity of Matisse? We approach it through the radicality and daring of his break with the Art-Form, to the extent that the latter is both inscribed and made in a history, and as a history which is that of the (continuous) evolution or the (discontinuous) succession of the diverse forms of Art (in as much as this history is defined by Form), and where modernist formalism posits itself as its ultimate finality (painting returning to its essence in the optic of a pure pictorial flatness).
It is said that Fauvism (1905–7) would meet its ‘pictorial’ as well as its ‘spatial’ limit with the question of form. Fauvism is also posited as historically dated, in the sense that it was overtaken by the visual syntax of Cubism (itself set up as art's principle of modernisation, leading towards modernist abstraction).
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- Information
- Bergson and the Art of ImmanencePainting, Photography, Film, Performance, pp. 63 - 79Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013