“So it comes about that the effect of such a building is not merely not impaired when it is left uncompleted; its appeal and its power are actually increased. The inconclusiveness of the forms, which is characteristic of every dynamic style, gives emphasis to one’s impression of endless, restless movement for which any stationary equilibrium is merely provisional. The modern preference for the unfinished, the sketchy, and the fragmentary has its origin here. Since Gothic days all great art, with the exception of a few short-lived classicist movements, has something fragmentary about it, an inward or outward incompleteness, an unwillingness, whether conscious or unconscious, to utter the last word. There is always something left over for the spectator or the reader to complete. The modern artist shrinks from the last word, because he feels the inadequacy of all words – a feeling which we may say was never experienced by man before Gothic times.”
(Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, trans. Stanley Godman, vol. 1, pp. 242–3.)
Rackstraw Downes spoke at the NY Studio School a week or two ago. He said he doesn’t consider himself a modern artist because he wants to make WHOLE (not fragmentary) paintings. A show of his recent work is at the Betty Cuningham Gallery through 11/24.
This is from Anne Wagner’s review in the current London Review of Books of Hal Foster’s The First Pop Age: “A Pictures picture [a picture made by a Pictures Generation artist (Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, etc.)] must be both formally and conceptually governed by indentifiable conventions; these make it a whole, which an image by one of Foster’s Pop artists need not be.”
Thanks for the notes, Jock!