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Joseph Masheck wants to take art, historical and modern, as a field of lively interrelations (as if in "random-access memory" retrieval), rather than just second the motion that art history should be nonlinear; and he takes the task of art criticism to be theory in practice. Thus significant new art is represented in the thirty essays in Modernities, besides already "classic" modern architecture, sculpture, and photography, and contemporary painting by artists. Alternating between a comprehensive sense of art history and engagement with the new and unplumbed contemporary arts, he considers himself a kind of aesthetic double agent.
Because Masheck is concerned with the concrete standing of artworks, he speculates on how works of art, including Marcel Duchamp's "ready-mades," relate to other things. More general themes range from the origin of the modern sense of form in prehistoric art to the historical underpinnings of expressionism and on to latter-day "graffiti" culture.
| List of Illustrations | ||
| Preface | ||
| Introduction in Praxis | 1 | |
| Foundations | 13 | |
| 1 | Alberti's "Window": Art-Historiographic Notes on an Antimodernist Misprision | 15 |
| 2 | On Cycladic Ultramodernity | 33 |
| 3 | Neolithic-Modern | 41 |
| Architecture in Review | 47 | |
| 4 | Expressionist Fantasias: The Crystal Chain Letters | 49 |
| 5 | Temples to the Dynamo: The "Daylight" Factory and the Grain Elevator | 55 |
| 6 | Living Modern: James Stirling's Sackler Museum | 63 |
| Sculpture and Things | 71 | |
| 7 | Readymades: Art Accompli | 73 |
| 8 | The Propeller and the Bird in Space | 81 |
| 9 | Attaining to Nature: Maureen Connor | 103 |
| 10 | Robert Gober's Non-Readymades | 109 |
| Photo-Ideas | 113 | |
| 11 | Think-Shots: Henri Le Secq | 115 |
| 12 | Photo-Gloss: On Paul Strand's Cristo with Thorns | 121 |
| 13 | Mike and Doug Starn: Photoexhibitionism 1930/1990 | 137 |
| Preexpressionism to Neoexpressionism | 145 | |
| 14 | (T)Rapt in Tvilight: On Scandinavian "Symbolism" | 147 |
| 15 | Raw Art: "Primitive" Authenticity and German Expressionism | 155 |
| 16 | A Note on Polke | 193 |
| 17 | Street Wisdom: Judy Rifka and Graffiti Culture | 197 |
| The Play of Texts | 211 | |
| 18 | Two Blasts-from-the-Past in Picasso (and Yes, Marcel, You Too) | 213 |
| 19 | Notes on Influence and Appropriation | 223 |
| 20 | Snake-Oil from Julio Schnitzel (A Parody) | 231 |
| 21 | Peter Halley on the Nature, Blah-blah-blah, of Abstract Art | 237 |
| 22 | Mike Bidlo as Pablo | 243 |
| New Abstract Painting | 249 | |
| 23 | Piecing Things Together: A Conversation with Sean Scully | 251 |
| 24 | A Note on David Reed | 259 |
| 25 | Thomas Nozkowski: Painting and the Struggle of Analogy | 263 |
| 26 | Ross Bleckner's Chamber and the Limits of Sublimity | 269 |
| 27 | Painting in Double Negative: Jonathan Lasker | 275 |
| 28 | Antic Gravity: Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe | 287 |
| 29 | David Row, C. S. Peirce, and the Texture of Thought in Painting | 297 |
| Sources and Acknowledgments | 303 |
Overview
Joseph Masheck wants to take art, historical and modern, as a field of lively interrelations (as if in "random-access memory" retrieval), rather than just second the motion that art history should be nonlinear; and he takes the task of art criticism to be theory in practice. Thus significant new art is represented in the thirty essays in Modernities, besides already "classic" modern architecture, sculpture, and photography, and contemporary painting by artists. Alternating between a comprehensive sense of art ...