ART THEORY LINKS

PREFACE MAKING CHOICES From March to September 2000 while I was writing this essay, the Museum of Modern Art, New York celebrated the millennium with a cycle of twenty five exhibitions that set in place a philosophy of Modernism that cut through all the isms of the last twelve decades. Making Choices (March 16th to September 26th 2000) is a diverse conglomeration that brings together works of art of the last century, which could not be conveniently labelled with any of the isms that I had found confusing - not to say irrelevant - while I researched the subject of modern art. One point became clear to me as it did to the curators of Making Choices. Modernism can be any work of art (photographs included) done since 1880, from Arp to Wyeth. The title of this essay changed several times as I made my own choices and discoveries. I felt the need to adapt my initial thoughts to a dialectical process that continues. For example, one visit to the National Gallery London changed dramatically my limited perception of what I had called Christian art. For the first time I saw beyond the presence of Christ and his sleeping apostles and saw Bellini’s splendid rocky landscape at sunrise - a ravishing work of art. Prolonged conversations with other students, painters and friends made my research interdisciplinary and contributed to the metamorphoses of my text. At first I thought I had locked my self into a protracted dilemma but almost at once it became an adventure. It had been pointed out to me that the task undertaken was ambitious, although linking art and Marxism via Hegel was a solution that had been contemplated by writers like Adorno, Lukacs and the Frankfurt School of Thought. Because I had to write this dissertation from a painters viewpoint I changed the first title Marxism and Art to include the name of the German author of the Aesthetics, the philosopher Frederic Hegel. The discovery of Hegel’s majestic reflections on fine art initiated a dialectical process that forced one to look much further back than the last twelve decades, to the cave paintings in the Ardeche valley 30.000 years before Christ. Vladimir Ilich Lenin conceded that a profound understanding of Marx’s Capital cannot be achieved without reading Hegel’s Science of Logic. Therefore Marxism could be applied to an investigation of the material conditions in which works of art are created, situating them within the appropriate context. I became convinced that to achieve an understanding of the social philosophy of art a balance between the spiritual and the material is a pre-requisite. Arnold Hauser in The concept of Ideology in the History of Art is raises issues for which no clear and definite answers have been found. Philosophers, sociologists or art historians, have avoided salient questions such as, Does art effect and change our lives and if so, is it possible today for art to improve society? A Social Philosophy of Art was my next choice of title. I became more ambitious. To merely interpret art history was not enough. I decided to activate and respond to the dialectical processes that could change it. The fact that I am a painter born in Skopye, Macedonia, a Marxist country meant I had to follow Marx for a while. There was a conflict between the traditional academic art education I had experienced in Skopye, which insisted on such disciplines as life drawing (the nude is the bases of all my pictures) and the post-modern lack of discipline that I encountered in Britain. But to resolve this conflict I found the need for a philosophical equilibrium in order to see that post-modernism can be useful to a Marxist approach to art history because at least it reflects superficially the decadent values of capitalist society. As such post-modernism forces one to seek higher aesthetic values as it bombards us with anti-aesthetic ones. When it dawned on me that any change I could make in the history of art would be part of the dialectical process I was discovering, A Dialectical Philosophy of Art had to be my final choice of title. 30th September 2000 BACK   FORWARD