PAINTING/PRINTMAKING Art 571a, Formalism Revisited

Although formalist views of art constituted an important approach during the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, innovative artists in the past three decades have moved away from stylistic designations predicated on form. Consequently, the legacy of mid-twentieth-century formalism as codified by critic Clement Greenberg has become either a rote topic for reactionaries still clinging to a modernist point of view, or an ignored one, which has been considered irrelevant to contemporary concerns. Because formalism, considered broadly from the eighteenth century to the present, remains a tremendous and largely untapped artistic reservoir, it is a subject that merits reevaluation from our present-day perspective. As part of this reassessment, this course takes a wide historical view of formalism that moves beyond Greenberg’s limited modernist approach to a more far-reaching and provocative redefinition. It employs formalism as a tool for understanding Immanuel Kant’s transcendentalism, G. F. W. Hegel’s three-tiered idealist aesthetic, Stéphane Mallarmé’s divided symbols, Russian Formalism’s structuralism, Walter Benjamin’s aura and Guy Debord’s spectacle, as well as Georges Bataille’s emphasis on the formless that Yves Alain-Bois and Rosalind Krauss have reconsidered in recent years. In addition to these approaches, the class considers specific artists working within different contexts. The course employs the Socratic method to look at specific readings and selected works of art from the eighteenth century to the present. Robert Hobbs