Chapter 2 Summary

“Sculpture in the Age of Doubt, by Thomas McEvilley, 1999. Chapter 2 Summary

The descriptive word of “post-war” in the 1980s, slowly led into the idea of being “post-modern”, “post-human” – post-everything, disconnecting from its predecessors .
At the proclaimed end of the Kantian tradition, which valued form over content, the previous taboos of the old art school declared their spots in the newly opened field, becoming the exact opposite of what art had been before. This created fresh opportunities for the experiences that the previous age had avoided.

In Kantian terms, there are two roots of style: the visual/internal root, which is the link with previous art and aesthetics, and the social/external root which is the link to surrounding culture, such as social, ethnical, and political issues. Contrary to the past, the roles of the roots were now reversed in the new art age and the content of the social root took dominance over visual style. In other words, variety in style took over the unified body of an individual artwork and the category it belonged to.

Before, art was a quest to reflect the soul, portrayed by the physical perfection of the human form and flawless representation of the environment mastered by the Greeks, eventually evolving into pure abstraction of the soul directly in non-human form, until the World Wars happened. The destruction of the world was reflected in the changed views that art took – rejection of the tradition of the soul in artwork in the guise of soulless objects, slowly growing into deconstructiveness, or anti-art.

Even though painting and sculpture have similar principles, painting was considered more elite by the Greeks due to the manual labour sculpture involves, and this sentiment was passed on until the new age of doubt. The representational illusion gave way to the material presence of sculpture, aka “escapist fantasy versus directly dealing with the real world.” The two fields started to form separate ideologies with the arrival of anti-art. While the anti-art version of painting was going against the aesthetics of traditional painting, Duchamp's readymades are an example of the anti-art form of sculpture – instead of representing something, anti-art presented unpretentious objects that were nothing but themselves.

While the nature of paintings was limited to being only a picture of something, sculpture expanded to the possibility of being any “thing” as long as a label or designation is attached to it, as declared by Duchamp, to the extent that it can even be immaterial. This ideology has the upper hand where you could regard a painting as a sculpture, but not vice versa, and thus, in the author's eyes, the primary medium in the new age of doubt.

Thoughts % discussion questions:

To me, art is a reflection of our thoughts and a peek inside the soul of the artist, and based on the reading, this is an old school's traditional view. Personally I lean more towards old school thinking, in terms of aesthetics as well. What does art mean to you?

Would you consider our current generation as still post-modern, or have we moved on to an age of certainty without realizing it?

If a soulless object is declared as art, does it still hold as much meaning as an artwork with “soul”?