Out of time [electronic resource] : Philip Guston's return to figuration and the crisis in the humanities.

9780549067245

2007

1 online resource (424 p.)

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If there is one thing that the thirty-three paintings Philip Guston exhibited in 1970 at the Marlborough Gallery in New York City are known for, it is their audacious and unfashionable "return to figuration." This dissertation examines these contentious paintings' engagement with figuration---evident both in their willfully crude imagery and their resurrection of the artist's past motifs---as part of Guston's response to a 'crisis in the humanities.' This crisis, arising amidst the grisly revelations of inhumanity following the Second World War and the emergence of radically new forms of information technology, found its most cogent articulation in the second half of the 1960s when a growing number of intellectuals and artists denounced traditional aesthetic forms such as narrative and metaphor (i.e. figuration) for what was seen as their intrinsic duplicity and obsolescence in a thoroughly mediated world and in turn questioned the possibility of authentic subjective expression. As someone who was not wholly willing to abandon the humanistic legacy yet recognized its failings Guston attempted to 'figure' this dilemma and like many other artists working in the 1960s, turned to the discourse of history as a means to represent a present that appeared increasingly resistant to representation. Recognizing the non-mimetic and specifically temporal aspects of figuration---understanding the trope as a mode of substitution, as in metaphor of metonymy---reveals how Guston and many of his contemporaries engaged in what could be called alternative forms of figuration. These non-morphological modes of figuration, which posit 'the literal' rather than 'the abstract' as their antithesis, have been typically overlooked in previous accounts of the period. By reconsidering this foundational opposition within the discourse of modernism this dissertation, besides providing the most comprehensive account of Guston's art to date, strives to fundamentally reassess the history of postwar American art.

Books / Online / Dissertations & Theses

English

July 12, 2011

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2007.

Yale University.