Rosalind Krauss is an American art critic, professor, and theorist. Krauss explores the historical, theoretical, and formal contexts concerning modernism art.
The online dictionary Answers.com defines ‘historicism’ as ‘a theory that stresses the significant influence of history as a criterion of value’. Within the essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, Krauss addresses this concept of ‘historicism’ with consideration to the context of art.
Krauss suggests that historicism ‘works on the new and different to diminish newness and mitigate difference’(30). Furthermore, we ‘are comforted by this perception of sameness, this strategy for reducing anything foreign in either time or space, to what we already know and are’(30).
I am interested in the word ‘strategy’ that is used to describe this process of historicism for ‘reducing anything foreign…to what we already know and are’, and would like to suppose that to ‘historicise’ is almost like human nature.
When confronted with a new art-object, whether it be an image, sculpture or a painting. Initially one tries to immediately decipher and decode this new object, in order for one to make sense of this new experience and interpret it on some level. Wonder and awe provoke questions about the new foreign object we are confronted with, and we construct our own answers upon the object for the want and need to understand. This will be primarily based on what ‘what we already know and are’, for example what we have seen before, and what we have previously experienced, using this strategic tool of historicising. Memory is triggered and we naturally familiarize art objects than contain characteristics reminiscent of other objects in accordance with our visual library of past experiences as a strategy for us to identify. I can think of uncountable times people have used the phrase ‘This work reminds me of……(example)’ in an art critique. Simply trying to make sense of the new object by drawing relationships and making connections to comprehend and organize our thoughts in a way that is comfortable and rational. Although we can see these connections of the new object and history, we can still distinguish individuality and the ‘newness’ of the contemporary art object.
Which makes me question whether to historicise is sufficient to understand meaning? According to Wikipedia it states ‘a large number of thinkers have embraced the need for historical context, not because culture is self-referential, but because there is no more compressed means of conveying all of the relevant information except through history’. This view is said to be rooted in the work of a recent historian Benedetto Croce in the context of 20th Century philosophy.
In this case I believe that historicism should be embraced as the need for historical context, background and culture are essential for the need to make sense of the world around us.
References:
Krauss, Rosalind, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”, October, Vol.8 (Spring, 1979), pp.30-44.
Anwers.com, The world’s leading Q & A site. 7 April 2009. Answers Corporation. Retrieved 7 April 2009 http://www.answers.com/topic/historicism
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 7 April 2009. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Retrieved 7 April 2009 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicism
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It’s a difficult issue though – who gets to “write” history? There do seem to be big shifts in the tectonic plates of culture at certain times and I think the upheavals of the 1960s/70s was such a time. (Others might include Marxism, Industrial revolution, Darwinism?). At such divisive moments it no longer seems plausible to continue the same, long historical thread (teleology or not) when the logic has become so stretched to be ridiculous. In my view it is not that the art historians did not recognise the (new) artworks but either through intellectual complacency, insecurity or retention of power they resisted re-thinking their model to incorporate the significance of the new works. Krauss has effectively done that for them and written the new history.
ReplyDeleteThis historicism is reminiscent of terror management theory. Which in short suggests we combat our fears of death by clutching at cultural belief systems. Although I do also think that the need for things to be 'new', 'different', 'original' is over rated if not a little egocentric.
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