1 Introduction. General Outline of Argument.

Art and Ideology in the West:
From Cave Art to Modernism

Rajiv C Krishnan



1 Introduction. General Outline of Argument.

These blog postings derive from the short abstracts that I prepared for an illustrated lecture series that surveyed the major periods of Western art from its origins to the beginning of the twentieth century. My focus here will be on the ways in which ideological considerations determine the production and reception of works of art in the West. How have the relationships between art and its viewers and patrons, between art and its contexts, and between art and aesthetics changed over time? How does this art respond to the challenges and imperatives of modernity? What do we see when we see art? What do we know when we know art? What do we learn when we learn to look at art? How do we distinguish a work of art from other man-made objects? What is the nature of the value that we customarily attribute to or invest in works of art? What is the source of this value, and how might it be related to human labour and social praxis? These are the leading questions that will stay with us as we travel through the centuries, looking at the various objects and artefacts that we collectively designate as Western art. By the time we come to the end of the course, you should be able to formulate your own answers to these questions. You will notice that these are methodological and epistemological questions as well as ontological ones, and in this sense, they are critical questions as well. What we expect when we ask these questions is not to hit upon a single answer or even a group of answers to each one of them, but to keep alive a curiosity that is not unrelieved by seeking. And when we desist from demanding of these questions that they have unequivocal answers, we are recognizing the historical nature, not only of our questions, but also of the possible answers that we might generate. At every point in our discussions therefore, we shall find ourselves reassembling within art and its history not only the moment in which it found expression but also the moment in which it comes through to us now. These then are some of the questions that will be addressed in the lectures. The short summary of the course that follows is meant to indicate the general lines of inquiry rather than the specific details of the arguments.

The specific problems we address need to be tracked across the centuries and millennia during which the construct that we now call ‘Western Art’ gets enunciated—I therefore trace the historical trajectory of these problems with readings of paradigmatic and characteristic examples from each major historical period. The lectures begin with cave art, move on to analyses of Egyptian, Greek and Byzantine artefacts, and then present items from the Middle Ages in order to demonstrate how, for roughly similar purposes, the differing ideological contexts of these works determined the particular formal strategies and solutions employed in them. I then present examples from Renaissance, Mannerist, Baroque and Neoclassical art to sustain an argument about the development of Realist art that presents artistic technique as the ideologically sensitised counterpart of essentially bourgeois modes of production and possession.

With Realist art and Impressionist art, we move into a mode that is increasingly alienated from the forms of experience that are characteristic of capitalistic societies. Avant-gardism and aestheticism, I argue, must be seen, whatever else they might indicate, also as modes of self-reliance and resistance that refuse to buy experiences that are made to appear ‘natural’ (and thus, beyond critique) by dominant ideologies. Modernist art continues this trend, but loses ground by reverting to the unhappy belief that art now had enough independent power of its own to generate and activate models for political action: political totalitarianism—which was interested in politicising the aesthetic—and reactionary Modernism (read aesthetic totalitarianism)—which aestheticized politics—were thus able to form a potent and disastrous constellation of forces. Postmodernist art, inasmuch as it is a reaction to twentieth-century (Modernist) totalitarianisms, can be seen both as a nihilist and as a simultaneously substantive attempt to rid art of its constraints as an institution, making ever-stronger claims of autonomy, and freely incorporating the very processes and products of modernity that High Modernism had disavowed. This is the rough outline of the overall argument, and even though we end our survey with the early twentieth century, it is one of the purposes of this course to demonstrate to what extent it would be possible for a study of earlier art to anticipate these positions. The choice of this vantage point will therefore dictate not only the choice of examples, but also the relative weights of one period over the other or of one artist over the other.