INTRODUCTION
1. General
Objective: Becoming Familiar with Contemporary Art
1.a. The
Paradox:
We are very
familiar with contemporary technologies. Airplanes, cars, and even digital
television, multifunctional mobile phones, computers, the internet, and the
most sophisticated software no longer surprise us. We may marvel at such
ingenuity and the rapid evolution of these technologies, but they are familiar
to us.
By contrast,
contemporary art presents itself under the guise of strangeness. It too often
appears to us as incomprehensible. Here lies a paradox: we are modern when it
comes to technology, but from another era when it comes to artistic production.
1.b. The Way
to Familiarize Ourselves:
We must
start with an art that is just as unfamiliar to us as contemporary art is. This
is the case with Medieval art.
There is a
false sense of familiarity with medieval art. It is still around us. There is
hardly a village in France without a church from the 12th or 13th century.
Medieval castles also populate our countryside, often in its more rugged areas.
Yet, this
art is truly steeped in “strangeness.”
2.
Prejudices
2.a. The
Middle Ages as a Dark Age
a. Antiquity
is familiar to us through the Renaissance. The Renaissance revived both Greek
and Roman sculpture and architecture. Mythology came to either replace or at
least rival the Bible as a source of artistic inspiration.
b. Our
aesthetic foundation is Renaissance art. It's the perspective we were taught in
drawing class (before "visual arts" replaced it in school). It’s the
thousands of works that decorate our greatest museums. It’s the advertising
that borrows from painting (and music) for its models. Our way of seeing is
entirely shaped by the aesthetic born during this period and maintained until
the late 19th century. Our gaze is from the 15th century.
c. Thus, the
Middle Ages are perceived as a cultural chaos, a mere "parenthesis"
between Antiquity and the Renaissance.
2.b. The
Middle Ages: The True Foundation of Our Culture
Yet, and
here is another paradox, Antiquity is in fact a world that is foreign to us.
The Renaissance is merely a reshaping of the medieval world.
The
"French landscape" is more medieval than Renaissance. Our culture is
Christian: our calendar of holidays and saints; our moral values are Christian.
Schools originate from the Middle Ages (Charlemagne and Alcuin, his
"minister" of education). The layout of some city neighborhoods dates
back to the Middle Ages. Many rural villages, seen from afar, still resemble
how they looked in medieval times.
2.c. The
Romantic Prejudice
The
perception of the Middle Ages as a dark era also comes from 19th-century
Romanticism. Romanticism drew on “dark forces”: it’s the romantic genius found
in the Gothic novel. The Monk by Lewis is a perfect illustration, as is
Goethe’s Faust.
The
fascination with ruins that characterizes Romanticism focused more on Gothic
ruins than on those of Pompeii, Herculaneum, the Roman Forum, or the Athenian
Acropolis.
2.d. The
“Modern” Prejudice
Another
modern prejudice that distances us from the Middle Ages concerns architecture.
Since Le Corbusier, architecture has been functionalist: the purpose of a
building or its parts should be immediately legible in its form. Medieval
churches, we are told, do not meet this standard (which is incorrect, since at
the height of classical Gothic style, the cathedral was conceived as a fully
embodied architectural treatise).
2.e. The
Prejudice of Beauty
One may
enter a church and find the vaults beautiful, the capitals or the tympanum over
the portal beautiful. But this is an anachronistic judgment. Romanesque
sculpture is not “beautiful.” It does not seek to be. Judging it as such is to
view it through Renaissance eyes. And this prejudice further hinders our
understanding of the art of that time. One might say a sculpture is not
beautiful because the body is distorted, poorly proportioned (not conforming to
the Greek canon). But once again, the artist's goal was not beauty.
3. The
Effort Required to Understand
Therefore,
an effort is needed to understand the Middle Ages — just as an effort is needed
to understand contemporary art. The similarity of these efforts justifies why
this course begins not with Antiquity but with the Middle Ages. The same work
is required to access both.
We will
engage in both efforts throughout this course, which will aim to characterize
periods and artistic movements more by what distinguishes them than by what
connects them — a necessary approach in an introductory phase.
JR
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