Carnivalesca: What Painting Might Be
With Carnivalesca we want to create a dialogue with a traditional art form: painting.For this approach, we have looked to the meaning of carnival, because it evokes exuberance, delight and, underneath it all, a certain uncertainty or even melancholy. While the phenomenon of carnival is generally associated with a Western Christian festive season, it has antecedents in antiquity and has undergone innumerable syncretic cultural transformations around the world. Interpretations of carnival present it as a social institution that degrades the higher functions of thought and the sacred realm of the soul by translating them onto the bodily and the grotesque, ultimately, to renew society and the world in which it appears. This may also be seen as a site to release the impulses that threaten the social order and the norms it regulates; and as a place where divergent social groups can focus their conflicts and incongruities. This exhibition aims to transfer this meaning onto a discussion about contemporary painting and its discourses.
Painting in the Western world seems to be governed by a number of unspoken rules that limit the impact it could have in our discursive environment. Famously, influential modernist art critic Clement Greenberg produced a rigid understanding of aesthetic experience and its autonomy which became the paradigm for Western painting after WWII, and which latently persists to date. To put it concisely, Greenberg鈥檚 theory inherently rejected the social role of art. Such an aesthetics of autonomy鈥攚hat Benjamin H. D. Buchloh called Greenberg's "conservative formalism" 1鈥攈eavily affected how the purpose of painting was seen and received, and the effects of this shaped key features of the art market that we still see today.
When it comes to the discourse of painting, a reductionist conception seems to persist in the Western context. Painting is reduced to how it has been canonized in Western art history, and the concept of art that upholds this is overwhelmingly based on Western notions of the subject. Reduction is perhaps the oldest conceptual obsession of the Western world, it is both central to the centuries-old processes of individualization that center in on the anthropocentric and Eurocentric subject; and the cultural production that results from societies where such subjects are given central importance.
We can oppose this with pluralism: ideas that foreground diversity of experience; with multiplicity in society and its social structures; and鈥攚ith special regard to the arts in particular鈥攚ith the idea of individual experiences in the multitude, community traits that are "hybrid, fluid, deterritorialized, and constantly moving"鈥攁s developed in the political thought of Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri as well as philosopher Paolo Virno.2 In short, with ideas that make room for an unstable subject: a multifaceted, polymorphic, pluri-discursive subject that takes shape at multiplied intersections, paving the way for a new intersubjective politics of seeing and experiencing painting.
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With Carnivalesca we want to create a dialogue with a traditional art form: painting.For this approach, we have looked to the meaning of carnival, because it evokes exuberance, delight and, underneath it all, a certain uncertainty or even melancholy. While the phenomenon of carnival is generally associated with a Western Christian festive season, it has antecedents in antiquity and has undergone innumerable syncretic cultural transformations around the world. Interpretations of carnival present it as a social institution that degrades the higher functions of thought and the sacred realm of the soul by translating them onto the bodily and the grotesque, ultimately, to renew society and the world in which it appears. This may also be seen as a site to release the impulses that threaten the social order and the norms it regulates; and as a place where divergent social groups can focus their conflicts and incongruities. This exhibition aims to transfer this meaning onto a discussion about contemporary painting and its discourses.
Painting in the Western world seems to be governed by a number of unspoken rules that limit the impact it could have in our discursive environment. Famously, influential modernist art critic Clement Greenberg produced a rigid understanding of aesthetic experience and its autonomy which became the paradigm for Western painting after WWII, and which latently persists to date. To put it concisely, Greenberg鈥檚 theory inherently rejected the social role of art. Such an aesthetics of autonomy鈥攚hat Benjamin H. D. Buchloh called Greenberg's "conservative formalism" 1鈥攈eavily affected how the purpose of painting was seen and received, and the effects of this shaped key features of the art market that we still see today.
When it comes to the discourse of painting, a reductionist conception seems to persist in the Western context. Painting is reduced to how it has been canonized in Western art history, and the concept of art that upholds this is overwhelmingly based on Western notions of the subject. Reduction is perhaps the oldest conceptual obsession of the Western world, it is both central to the centuries-old processes of individualization that center in on the anthropocentric and Eurocentric subject; and the cultural production that results from societies where such subjects are given central importance.
We can oppose this with pluralism: ideas that foreground diversity of experience; with multiplicity in society and its social structures; and鈥攚ith special regard to the arts in particular鈥攚ith the idea of individual experiences in the multitude, community traits that are "hybrid, fluid, deterritorialized, and constantly moving"鈥攁s developed in the political thought of Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri as well as philosopher Paolo Virno.2 In short, with ideas that make room for an unstable subject: a multifaceted, polymorphic, pluri-discursive subject that takes shape at multiplied intersections, paving the way for a new intersubjective politics of seeing and experiencing painting.
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