Dear Ian and company
Thanks for the erudite check on "cento". It shifts my understanding of
the term in discussion of some nineteenth and twentieth century work
using simulation techniques and aesthetics..
In art and design historical discussion of _cento_ aesthetics,
(for instance at Goldsmiths' - Sarat Maharaj, at Essex - Michael Podro
and John Nash, at Courtauld - Anthony Blunt, at Oxford - Edgar Wind)
'cento' has been used to characterise what preceded modernist collage,
that is because it brings together into one site sources not originating
with the site facture (not invented by the painter, designer,
craftsperson making the work) but, unlike collage, in which the
composition continues to present a feasible singular reality.
'cento' in this sense was preceded in 18th century Reynolds by the idea
of the _composite_ (for example composite and allegorical portraits) and
preceded in 15th/16th century work by Mantegna, Grunewald, Titian and the
Tudor Eworth.
(modernist collage, following this sequence, disrupts _cento_ method by
its insistence on more than one reality on the one site, deliberately not
smoothed out into a singular narrative or feasible reality.
the reintroduction of _cento_ method, _IF_ it really is a reintroduction,
in 1953 by Larry Rivers and then Richard Hamilton, and as you note by
John Ashbery, begins a phase shift into mid-nineteenth century
aesthetics, that is into an aeshetics that precedes Faraday's aesthetics
as well as the conceptual innovations that followed.
allen fisher
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|