| Artist: | Mark Tansey |
|
|---|---|---|
| Title: | A Short History of Modern Painting | |
| Date: | 1979-1980 | |
| Nationality: | American | |
| Context: | Postmodern Pluralism | |
| Movement: | Revisionist History Painting | |
| Materials: | oil on canvas | |
| Subject: Tansey's allegory on Modernism. He focuses here on issues of the surface and 3 metaphors of what pictorial space has been said to be: the painting as window, as flat plane, as a mirror reflection. For Tansey, painting is about more than what meets the eye; painting is not merely surface, it is also content. Style: seemingly artless style; lets content dominate. He employs a flat, descriptive, didactic style suited to communicate visual information, like that used for medical illustration or images in history books; they look downright illustrational, a taboo in Modernism. The paintings are monochrome. He wants you to read the images as text or allegories--to get to the stories through the imagery in order to explain what you see. He begins with a layer of monochrome pigment that dries in about 6 hrs., after which it can be modified only with great pains. The images are produced by wiping or pulling the paint away. Works like an Old Master, starting from a middle tone, then adding darks and wiping away to lights. Archival in approach: painting as historiography (the history of art history). His style cultivates an air of datedness or "retro"--they seem historical, like dated realism, but conceptually they speak of how Postmodernism goes forward by deconstructing the past. Context: a Postmodern moment that sees Modernism and the avant-garde as part of history. Instead of a Utopian, future-oriented direction, these artists turn back to try to see where we've been; they are on the lookout for Modernism's blind spots--its demystifying values and limitations of vision. Art not in search of transcendence and the heroic; more concerned with a historical critique and deconstruction; anti-formalism; emphasis placed on content over form. Giving depth to meaning. Identifies his role "as opening up content." | ||
