"Well," gasped Mr. Button, "which is mine? (newly born baby) "
"There!" said the nurse.
Mr. Button's eyes followed her pointing finger, and this is what he saw. Wrapped in a voluminous white blanket, and partly crammed into one of the cribs, there sat an old man apparently about seventy years of age.
(Fitzgerald, 1922 p.5)
For one of the largest exhibitions of contemporary art in 1936, Alfred Barr compiled a catalogue with approximately 400 works and supported this path of the art movements with a diagram. But how correct is it to materialize the process of developing the art with such a diagram? Is it possible to change the arrows in the reverse direction?
History has already tried to deal with the reverse movement of time. The "Curious Case of Benjamin Button" begins with the birth of an old man who will grow younger and stronger, but at the end of his life, he will leave this world as a small newborn child. This movement of time, of course, contradicts our usual order, but this example helps us look at something ordinary with a new look. The issues of the passage of time, our memory (accumulated experience) and the man himself, his consciousness and his presence in this world at the moment, will help us understand our perception of things.
Alfred Barr indicated the dates 1890 to 1935 as the most significant period for the formation and development of modernist art. Yes, of course, key figures are highlighted in it, and the directions that influenced the development of the ideas of that time. But how unequivocally can it be argued that only, for example, Japanese prints inspired artists to create modernist works, but, for example, Greek sculptures did not? One of the works of Cezanne
"Still Life with Cupid" already speaks of the presence of culture from previous centuries. In other words, in my opinion, Barr's table is very simple and includes only those necessary milestones that were necessary for him at that particular moment for performing a good exhibition. And of course, the assertion that everything that happens, for example, after constructivism, will be a geometric abstract art, is a very simple conclusion. So how I would define minimalism or conceptual art without actually any canvas on the wall?! Is it really under the geometric abstract art or it is under the non-geometrical abstract art? Neither of both!
To explain the reasons for the emergence of something new, one way or another, one must take into account all the experience, because it is accumulated and significant in the formation of the new. “Psychologist Richard Gregory (2004) characterized perceptions as hypotheses, suggesting that perceptual information is always "cooked" by prior knowledge and expectations. Summarizing this position, he comments "if past experience, assumption, and active processing are important, there can hardly be raw data for vision".” (Taberham, 2014). Thus, we can argue that our accumulated knowledge is summed up in our consciousness and embodied in something deformed. But how new this could be is also a question, because some parts of the new were already in the world, which means the whole is not completely new. Barr's diagram will be a very crude designation, for example, of neo-impressionism, without impressionism itself. Such partial information does not quite correctly reflect the reality of previous experience for all of Cubism and Abstract art in general.
Here, an important understanding of experience is the man himself and his presence in the world. This point should be highlighted in a separate analysis, but in this small essay, this is not the purpose of my research. Therefore, I will not take into account the theories of Descartes, Cōgitō ergō sum (from lat. - “I think, therefore, I am”), Kierkegaard, where the main question is what was the beginning - my existence or the thought of my existence, without taking into account Heidegger's philosophy, where a person is aware of his temporary presence in the world and his imminent death. I will confine myself to the groundless assertion that my perception of the world is there as long as I am in consciousness. A good example is the medical condition of anaesthesia, that is, it is not a dream, I do not see dreams, nor death, because I return back to the reality that I remember. If my brain turns off, then for me there will be no existence, will happen "nothingness", death. Here it can be assumed that the world is not a reality in which I am surrounded by houses, plants and people, but it is a reality in my head, in my body. The body which is separated from the world by my physical state. The body as an organism with its flows, hard and soft structures, pressure, it is a separate world, a point of beginning and end, closed on itself. Through this closed world, I look back at the past experience of other people, my own experience, and, it can be said, I am the past. Because the assessment of the past happens at this moment and for me. For example, the Black Square, according to Malevich, was an exit to pure painting, coming to zero, and I can interpret it as minimalism or as conceptual art. Malevich had an idea, concept, and he interpreted it through Black Square. Thus, each of us can and does change the perception of the past in our small world. For you, for me, for him, it will be now, and this is what matters.
Baxandall asked the same question, so who ultimately influence whom? What is this influence? He explained this with X and Y, where the former did something to the latter. But the author cites several sayings that indicate the fact of the present time and our work with the event in the past. Baxandall also gives an example of how Picasso reworked Cezanne's legacy and thereby changed his position in the world of art. Therefore, the very meaning of the “influence” of someone from the past is very ambiguous. Influence rather occurs in both directions. Malevich left behind a work that inspires me, but I am also changing the very position of work in the world and its significance by discussing it and recreating it.
Wikipedia [online] At: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-contemporary (Accessed 02.03.2020)
Why do we perceive time as a linear process? Barr indicates progression in his schedule, but after all, time can be considered as cycles. We can assume that there is a certain reality - the big bang theory, which made rotate: particles, galaxies, planets, Earth, the Sun in space. This results in a change of day and night, and in the man, as a separate world, but subordinate to this big given, so he is also changing with general universal rotation. So to say the man is like the Sun in a Galaxy or Galaxy itself in a Universe. Between the big concept of the universe and the small concept of the world in the man, there is the only difference is the time of existence of these worlds. The big world may disappear in one moment, but we don’t know about it for sure, that we know for sure that our inner world will one day die.
Returning to the Barr diagram, I would, first of all, consider the whole process of the development of art in large and not in a linear form as shown in the above example, but rather it should be some kind of circular loop system. This loop does not develop downward, upward, not in any other direction, but space. I would even say that it cannot be represented as a bodily object or diagram since these are events that can be repeated, will return from the past, but they will be different and the same. Any attempts to reverse time can be represented as a peculiar progressive (?) loop movement, we can really go back, for instance, to expressionism, but this will be something of both past and future at the same moment. It will be now in my consciousness, in my small world.
Summing up the analysis of how true it is to materialize the process of art development with such a diagram and whether it is possible to change to the reverse direction of the arrows, I conclude that: there can be questions to the Barr diagram concerning the initial period and the “final” period. The experience of the past millennia, one way or another, accumulates in us, and we use it in its entirety. In my opinion, it was rather reckless to assume that after 1935 there will be no other art forms. So how do we now attribute conceptual art, in which is object entity may be simply absent? The presence of the arrows going one direction is erroneous, they can be better presented as two-sided or no arrows, and in the space, or in a loop or a swirling vacuum, as the rotation of the planets where "now" is a Sun.
Bibliography and references
1. Alfred H. Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, 1936, New York The Museum of Modern Art, New York
2. Fitzgerald, F. S., (1922) The Curious Case of Benjamin Button [online] At: https://www.scribd.com/read/269763138/The-Curious-Case-of-Benjamin-Button(Accessed 27.02.2020)
3. MOMA https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2748(Accessed 27.02.2020)
4. Paul Cézanne, (1895) Still-Life with Plaster Cupid [painting] At: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Still-Life_with_Plaster_Cupid_Paul_C%C3%A9zanne.jpg (Accessed 27.02.2020)
5. Paul Taberham (2014) "Bottom-up processing, entoptic vision and the innocent eye in Stan Brakhage's work" The Journal for Movies and Mind. [Online] Volume 8, Issue1 (Summer 2014) p1-22 Available from: http://www.academia.edu/12257345/Bottom-up_processing_Entoptic_Vision_and_the_Innocent_Eye_in_the_Work_of_Stan_Brakhage (Accessed 28/06/18)
6. GREGORY, L.R. (1997) Eye and Brain, The Psychology of Seeing, Fifth edition, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey [online] At: https://www.scribd.com/read/299521537/Eye-and-Brain-The-Psychology-of-Seeing-Fifth-Edition#r_search-menu_490368 (Accessed 27.02.2020)
7. Баксендолл М., (2003) Узоры интенции, Об историческом толковании картин, Москва, ЮниПринт
8. Michael Baxandall (1987) Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures, Yale University Press New Haven And London
9. Picasso (1909) Head and African mask from Alfred H. Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, 1936, New York The Museum of Modern Art, New York
10. Wikipedia [online] At: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-contemporary (Accessed 02.03.2020)
11. resource not verified https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-contemporary
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