FP wrote: "You can use anything you want -
abstraction, even cliche - as long as it is somehow
recontextualized, revitalized."
I agree completely. And isn't that, in a nutshell, the definition of
post-modernism? Such is the case in the visual arts. Out with the long
list of reductive verbotens; to hell with the strictures, fling open the
gates that Modernism so systematically welded shut. All that matters is
whether it works, whether it breathes Anything is possible. Corpses can
be resurrected. Odd Nerdrum, as Dr Frankenstein, appalled his professors in
the 1970s by painting like a seventeenth-century master. 'You can't paint
in that dead style', they told him, and threw him out of the university.
But across Europe, shows of his 'dead' paintings became sold-out sensations.
Walking into a gallery of his paintings can cause immediate & permanent
re-orientation.
bj
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