2. Medium Specificity

Week two began with Clement Greenberg and his view of the avant garde, he saw it as intangible and fundamental meaning that was separate from other areas of life. He wanted to create an authentic culture, as opposed to the culture of kitsch which he saw arising. Kitsch is art that offers no intellectual challenge, is obvious and commercial, Greenberg saw this as offering faked sensations.

An artist he saw as opposing kitsch was Mark Rothko, his work being open to interpretation, not representational and was based on shape colour and emotion. The avant garde detaches art from life and aims to keep culture moving and politically defend culture.

Medium specificity is the idea that each medium should do what it does best, so painting should be about the visual and sculpture about the physical. Objects represented in paintings are tactile but the painting isnt, Greenberg saw this as a problem. He wanted paintings to be purely about shape and colour, a formalist defense of painting.

Jules Olitski in works like ‘Instant Loveland’ created fields of colour by spraying paint onto the canvas, moving to the core of the medium. This removed any tactile association and only addresses sight, creating a static visual contemplation for the viewer. His work has opticality where there is a depth only the eyes can see into, an unreadable space with no measurable depth as there are no marks.

In 1967 the idea of modernism was challenged by minimalism. Donald Judd worked with sculpture focusing on the physical. The three-dimensional nature of the work means that it must be experienced temporally, they aim to show the quality of the material they are made from. His work was often made in relation to the architectural space making the viewer think about how they encounter the space. In both Olitski and Judd we can see a flatness which they both use, this calls attention to its medium by not distracting from its primary aim.

Michael Fried saw minimalist art as halting the progress of high modernism. High modernist works were pictorial with a lack of tactile objects that you enter with just your eyes. He saw literalist works as theatrical and thus a failure as art.

Kenneth Noland used shape as a medium of painting, where the shape of canvas aids the harmonious composition. Whats on the canvas referencing the shape of the canvas.

Now how does this relate to me, well as an illustrator medium specificity is not exactly relevant as often something needs to be represented and cant just be about colour and shape. The idea of kitsch seems to be directly about illustration – commercial, representative and mass produced. The example we looked at in the lesson was Norman Rockwell who worked as an illustrator.