An interesting take, Mark, & I see its point, but am not wholly
convinced that we are only or simply taking the unfinished fragment for
the whole, although clearly with Sappho we manage something like that.
I would want to argue that her fragments mean more than that mouth, but
I'm not sure how to do it. On the other hand, yes, those various states
of a print do seem to have their own integrity. Maybe it's that (even
if its only our) feeling of integrity that signs something as
'complete'...?
Doug
On 7-Jan-05, at 3:16 PM, Mark Weiss wrote:
> Yeah, we tend to prefer the sketch to the "finished" work, precisely
> because it catches the artist in process. This is a pretty recent
> phenomenon, so much so that works deemed incomplete in the past are
> now ofetn thought to be finished work. Case in point: among the dozen
> or so Mont Saint Victioires of Cezanne's last decade is one stripped
> down to a few brush strokes on glue-primed but unpainted brown linen
> canvas. I saw it in a retrospective, with a bunch of the others. They
> were all beyond wonderful, but this one was on an astral plain.
>
> Related, I think, is our taste for pentimenti in finished paintings,
> which were often invisible inthe state that the artist left them, and
> as such not part of said artist's final intention. Over time they have
> asserted themselves through the upper layers of paint and laid bare
> some of the process. Similarly, etchings tend not to hide their
> process, but even when they do there are usually earlier state proofs,
> sometimes of fifteen or twenty states (Picasso's girl leading the
> minotaur, for instance, but also a lot of rmbrandts and 19th century
> print makers. The different states seem to us works of art in their
> own right, and sometimes the artist viewed them as such. They allow us
> to walk the process with him/her, to experience the whims and
> decisions.
>
> In a wonderful documentary, The Mystery of Picasso, we get to watch
> him through the entire process of a painting. I think it's readily
> available in rental stores.
>
> All of this I think goes back to the Renaissance and later taste for
> ruins and fragments that led people to construct artificial ruins in
> their gardens and caused them to value the fragments of Sappho and
> Holderlin not for our sense of what they might have been if complete
> but for what they are in themselves, a taste that continues. In the
> visual arts the silliest example that comes to mind is an art critic's
> gushing about a fragment--a mouth--of an Egyptian granite statue in
> the rehoused Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan--he called it the most
> beautiful thing in the collection. The thing is, within the rigidly
> standard rules of Egyptian art the mouths of almost all of the other
> statues in the Met could have been separated from their faces and the
> critic would have been hard put to tell which was which. But I think
> that the fragment allowed him to see the form without the interference
> of whatever his sense of the culture as a whole.
>
> I'm not suggesting that it's always so silly, tho preferring a part of
> what was intended to the realized whole seems like an invitation to
> vandalism. But I think what follows from this, or stems from the same
> source, is our interest in found objects (I have boxes of to me
> unnameable industrial parts), in collage and in bricolage. And also
> composition by field and other process-driven art.
>
> I imagine there's been a lot of writing about this. I regularly
> reinvent the wheel.
>
> Mark
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 Canada
(780) 436 3320
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
We both know the reason why you called
So stop wastin’ time tryin’ to soften up my fall
I know you wanna sweeten up the taste
But if you don’t mind I’ll just take my sorrow straight
Iris DeMent
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