excerpts below from James Elkins essay On Some Limits of Materiality in Art History
seeing is embodied and it should no longer be separated from touching, feeling, and from the full range of somatic responses
Clement Greenberg's high modernist trust in eyesight is no longer viable now that works of art are so often also textural, olfactory, tactile and auditory. Synthesthia, empathy and sympathy, emmersion performance and embodied encounters are now central to the art experience. Art history is no longer an archivist or iconographers paradise, driven by the textural sources ; it has become attentive to the physical stuff, the presence, the material of the art work, its bulk, its human scale and even its "base materiality"
The optical models of modernism are part of our past.we can understand the ideologies and desires that produced them and we can see how they supported a certain kind of art. Now those optical models are fading. The first decade of visual studies in the 1990's with its emphasis on disembodied media and digital images has been supplanted by a new and more versatile awareness of the real range of images.
What I really want to do I am beginning to do. eliminating steps that are no longer necessary .........like thinking too much.
The optical models of modernism are part of our past.we can understand the ideologies and desires that produced them and we can see how they supported a certain kind of art. Now those optical models are fading. The first decade of visual studies in the 1990's with its emphasis on disembodied media and digital images has been supplanted by a new and more versatile awareness of the real range of images.
What I really want to do I am beginning to do. eliminating steps that are no longer necessary .........like thinking too much.
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