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We are not painters (Because painting is a game); Modernist Formalism is Dead! (2008), GCGCA(i)

Modernist Formalism is Dead!

The Castrated Hedonism of the Aesthetic Tradition

Rothko Chapel, Houston

23 Sep - 21 Dec 2008

‘Dialectical images are constellations between alienated things and injected meanings, resting in a moment of indifference between death and meaning'

- Theodor Adorno

We are not painters (Because painting is a springboard for the imagination); Modernist Formalism is Dead! (2008), GCGCA(i)

Art had to become 'critical' once it had failed to become universally actual, if it was to continue to be associated with both the freedom and the social possibilities for critically significant expression that it had acquired in the formalist/aestheticist critique of tradition. Formalism destroyed the conventional symbolic attributes of traditional artistic media, as a condition for its rearticulation of their material elements on the basis of a complete freedom of relations (aestheticism).

This opened up the contrary possibility of a utilitarian deployment of forms (rationalization). Indifference to the traditional uses and significations of materials was thus the condition of both formalist-aestheticism and anti-aestheticism (early or strong conceptual art practise).

We are not painters (Because to paint is to give aesthetic value to flowers, women, eroticism, the daily environment, art, dadaism, psychoanalysis and the war in Vietnam); Modernist Formalism is Dead! (2008), GCGCA(i)

Clement Greenberg's formalist aesthetics was set out in his 'Towards a Newer Laocoön' in Partisan Review (1940). It had its main source in Lessing's eighteenth century treatise on aesthetics: 'Laocoön: An Essay on the Limit's of Painting and Poetry' (1766). Greenberg transformed the concept of self-referentiality into that of medium-specificity (medium-specificity means medium self-referentiality).

‘Aesthetic autonomy’ was thereby transformed into the task of medium self-definition through purification. Modernist art criticism mediated an aesthetic concept with a pseudo-Hegelian narrative of progressive purification, remaining trapped within a Kantian dualism: a reduction of the distinction between aesthetic and logic into the distinction between intuition and concept.

We are not painters (Because painting is the representation of objects); Modernist Formalism is Dead! (2008), GCGCA(i)

In Artforum, Krauss extended Greenberg's medium-specific modernist formalist project to embrace the three-dimensional art of the 1960s and early 1970s. Krauss left Artforum to found October, in which structuralist semiotics - the Greimas or Semiotic Square - was used to theorise new art within an ‘expanded field’.

However structuralism is itself a formalism. ’Aesthetic’ and ‘medium-specificity’ represent misconceptions about the autonomy of art. Krauss would later write about the ‘post-medium condition’ of contemporary art, in A Voyage on the North Sea (1999), before retreating to a theoretical formalism (modernism as a structural logic of vision).