ART - GOTHIC to RENAISSANCE to EARLY 20C

© DAVID CARR-SMITH 2009 : all images and text are copyrighted - please accredit text quotes - image repro must be negotiated via dave@artinst.entadsl.com

PART 1: FROM GOTHIC TO RENAISSANCE
PART 2: THE CUSP BETWEEN RENAISSANCE & EARLY 20TH CENTURY

PART 3: EARLY 20thC ... in process
PART 4: PAINTINGS AS ABSOLUTE OBJECTS ... in process

PART 1: FROM GOTHIC TO RENAISSANCE - PSYCHIC SPACE TO PHYSICAL SPACE ... in process

The closing of the boundary of the external world and a substitution of a mental 'ideal-physical' for manifestations of the sacred.

The change from Gothic to Renaissance perceiving was a phenomenon whose earlier developments were (in the absence of easy transport and communication links) spatially scattered and temporally unsynchronised. In order to show the inception and progress of this extraordinary perceptual change I have brought together works that exemplify and illustrate its stages (some by artists who actively innovated it, others who simply incorporated aspects that came to their attention) and arranged these in sequences that illustrate aspects of the progress of the phenomenon, rather than attempting to conserve their chronological relations - especially since//after all the wave of change eventually subsumed all local regions and converted all European cultures.

GEN=INTRO_RE GOTHIC ALTERS :
Everything in a picture is visually simultaneous, thus when its task is to depict transcendent meanings (to reveal the meaning-relation between events separated in time), it can literally use this characteristic of pictures as meaningful-content, as the foundation for a presentation of a structure that can depict simultaneously co-related meanings - the (mental) subject-matter aspect of an altar's main image. or it may use a row of separate pictures (a predella or altar-wings) each depicting a revelatory events/acts (typically - in the subsidiary predella - from an exemplary life lived in the temporal world), all subsumed in and informed by an encompassing eternal/sacred event - the altar's principal overriding image.


SIMONE DEI CROCHEFISSI: DREAM OF THE VIRGIN about 1365-80 - Bologna - egg tempera on wood - 56.5 x 42.5 cm - NG London This work is an example of a type of image and thus experiential structure, that predates the externalisation of awareness that begins to manifest in works of the late Gothic [see examples in this section] and dominates study and depiction in the Renaissance. It organises references to events that are connected in a web of meaning (which has been distilled via a study of sources conveyanced as 'traditional belief') - these are (necessarily) depicted as simultaneous, but in the external world were separated in space and time. This practitioner is not a great artist - for instance unlike Di Cione or Giotto, he is insensitive to the emotional affectiveness of visual beauty, let alone Giotto's awareness of the marvel of three-dimensional objects - he almost completely lacks interest in the sensual aspect of external things. However he does (almost) succeed in cramming into a visually-related ensemble, a collection of events which are dislocated in the external world. Indeed, the picture's event-construction is surely very like the fossil of a dream! .	JACOPO DI CIONE (Attributed): NOLI ME TANGERE about 1370-75 - Florence - egg tempera on wood - 56 x 38.2 cm - pinnacle panel from a Florence alterpiece - NG London ... in process

GIOTTO: ST FRANCIS RECEIVES THE STIGMATA 1295~1300 - Florence - tempera on wood - 313 x 163 cm - Louvre Paris ## ... in process	BONO DA FERRARA: ST JEROME IN A LANDSCAPE ... in process about 1440 - Siena/Ferrara - egg tempera on wood - 52 x 38 cm - NG London This picture is like a visual book - a diagram that describes the effort of achieving a sacred//holy life. It's an instruction plan for aspirants. An 'ad for the church'[1]. The space within this frame is divided into a mundane foreground world (in which the saint's body sits and his lion reclines, and an oculus-like opening into a second space in which the saint's head, perched upon its white cape, lives and contemplates (and potentially inhabits). This place beyond the defile between the fringing rocks is where the sacred is expressed by the almost accessible church and the implied promise of freedom and release into the glowing sky. To enter it fully however is still difficult (it still - in the painting - has the character of a dream or inner-vision) - the saint is motionless, only contemplatively within its church. Complete entry into the sacred church is still (in this picture) only potential - he must still pass the orange rocks (that include his contemplative head and halo within their outline!), even beyond these, in sight of his goal, is a church-obstructing[?] wood - the need to overcome its [?]impedance is signified by the cut stumps of trees [?]. However, much has been accomplished in the anteroom of the sacred world: the huge white rock (continuous in colour with the church - in substance also? - is it the rock from which the church is built?) is (as if) jutting from the saint's back - this rock that holds his books, is cleft by a tree, signifying his effort to grow in spirit in spite of the solidity of the (foreground) world VER2-ADD: The edge of the saints white cape forms with the edge of the left-hand cliff an 'eye-like' gap into this 'other' space//place, which includes at its rear a sky glowing with the possibility of a golden dawn, a rugged landscape with 3 peaks (## ?) backing the church (whose door is also glowing gold). The church is 'reflected' (via similar forms/colours) in the saint's (holy instruction?) books in a rock niche behind his back - these are (almost) certainly included in the 'sacred' oculus - the doubt signals that they are relevant in both spaces: the (foreground) world's tools to help entry to the church (etc) which chimes their forms - a white note hanging below them [WHAT DOES THIS SAY ??] (almost) continues the cape's lower edge, (almost) completing the 'sacred oculus' to the right frame and including these books within it. NOTE: [1] NB: an analogue: B&H Xmas-card advert !]:



LORENZO MONACO: INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF ST BENEDICT (LEFT PANEL) 1407~09 - Florence - egg tempera on wood - 28.4 x 52 cm - predella (left panel) - NG London Throughout this predella - illustrating significant events in the saint's life - Lorenzo demonstrates and undertakes to extend his ability to visualise and render what seems to him (and his culture) the most essential of his painting's subject-objects: the figures (while leaving their architectural containers merely formulaic). His interest in and visual grasp of groups of figures as single complex solids (their shapes simplified however by robes and determinedly monochromatic) is both sensationally and conceptually powerful. Though consisting of only two figures, it appears that the most difficult of these groups to visually conceptualise as a single three-dimensional solid-form was the baptism - further complicated by extending the form of the saint's arm and hand into a small blue jug.	GIOVANNI DI PAOLO: THE BIRTH OF ST JOHN THE BAPTIST 1454 - Siena - egg tempera on wood - 30.5 x 36 cm - predella (left panel) - NG London The emerging desire to make a painting image the external world is here exemplified in just one small case of struggle with the difficulty of exerting control of ones perception and its correlated mark-making. The fire in the grate is the inconspicuous opportunity: an object in the painting of no liturgical meaning-importance and thus open to different modes//means of representation - for instance, it is untrammelled by the tradition of figure depiction, a mode of representation already highly developed because of its central importance in the iconography of religious painting. Indeed, as this case demonstrates, although Giovanni is already quite able to convincingly portray the 3-dimensional complexity of clothed figures, these display nothing of the tension of initiating a completely new and real perception, their competent depiction is nothing like the effort to perceive reality, to use paint to sense the objective solid indupitable present factuality of the object that is the fire: its ash, sticks and flame. Because the artist - in respect of this tiny portion of his oeuvre - for some indeterminable reason - was driven to try to do something which had no skilled precedent, for which there existed no established depictive form; driven to exert a determination to actually perceive rather than beautifully paint from inside the canons and skills of his learned craft - he experienced what, since the late 19th C, has been considered the most extraordinary function of art: its application as a means of personal experiencing, its use as a direct means of pushing beyond established boundaries of recognition and knowing into a region of eliciting direct experiences. One sees analogous experiential innovating in the much grander works that initiated the Renaissance: Piero, Masaccio, etal - but does one ever see such a struggle to real-ise spent on a subject-matter of such inconsequentness before the late 19thC ! The consequence of this tiny portion of depictive painting being, as it was made and during the struggle of its making (it's not even fully solved!: note the wood that won't lie-down!), an unprecedented experience of present-moment realising - is that we also see it (after 561 years) still as present experience - we read his actions being made in present moments that we experience as our own. Personal discoveries rendered via work, are always experienced, not only by their maker but also by their spectator, as timeless, or rather as a present in time that is present throughout time, bound not by the date of its origination but only by the attuned attention of a human perceiver. This is the junction of discovery via both Art and Science. .

GIOVANNI DI PAOLO: ST JOHN THE BAPTIST RETIRING TO THE DESERT 1454 - Siena - egg tempera on wood - 30.5 x 49 cm - predella panel - NG London ... in process	CARLO CRIVELLI: THE VISION OF THE BLESSED GABRIELE about 1489 - Venice - egg & oil on wood - 141 x 87 cm - NG London ... in process
	perspective painting
GIOVANNI BELLINI: THE AGONY IN THE GARDEN about 1465 - Venice - egg on wood - 81.3 x 127 cm - NG London ... in process

PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA: PERSPECTIVE DIAGRAM: AN ARCHED VAULT SUPPORTED BY FOUR PILLARS around 1480 - page from De Prospectiva Pingendi (Perspective for Painting) - Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan. ... in process Every increase in human awareness is noticed, investigated, expanded and differentiated (in this example via a treatise by an innovating mathematician/artist). This abstracting/simplifying and precisionising of the shape-structure(s) of the external-visual world (the direction from which most body-affecting events emerge) leveraged means of pragmatic power (eg: visualising territory) and - as its results, rules and methods filtered into the culture of the late 15thC - enabled even minor, non-innovating, 'craft-artists' to drag their fantasies//mental-visions into an externalised depiction which (in an increasingly extraverted culture) made them persuasively real.	PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA: HEAD ANNOTATED FOR PERSPECTIVE PROJECTION (?) ( DIAGRAM) before 1482 - page from De Prospectiva Pingendi (Perspective for Painting) - Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan. ... in process

CARLO CRIVELLI: THE ANNUNCIATION, WITH SAINT EMIDIUS 1486 - Venice - egg & oil on canvas - 207 x 146.7 cm - NG London ... in process	RAPHAEL

MICHANGELO: DAVID 1501~04 - Florence - marble - 5.17m - Galleria dell' Accademia, Florence ... in process	LEONARDO DA VINCI: THROAT & MUSCLES OF LEG (ANATOMY RECORDING) c1510-11 - note-book page - pen & ink + wash over black chalk - 29 x 19.6 cm - Royal Collection Trust, Windsor. ... in process

CANALETTO: THE GRAND CANAL WITH S SIMEONE PICCOLO about 1740 - Venice - oil on canvas - 124.5 x 204.6 cm - NG London ... in process In some portion of our sense this is the almost perfect rendering of a perceived external place, in another (educated via the 'attention' research of the late 19C (so-called) Impressionism) it seems, though fascinating, as unreal as a model, completely lacking the scale of the actuality in which we exist and are. The dominance of an over-encompassing method of seeing; the completion/perfection of a technique of rendering the appearance of spatial location (called 'perspective'), has finally become a (belief-)system that filters and separates vision from experience, as if a straight-jacket around the exercise and means of perceiving. Such paintings are beautiful and fascinating recordings of a perfected aspect of culture (thus almost defunct in its ability to open the world), which nevertheless, as a whole, still has two centuries worth of other resources to exploit and extend - more inward, ideal, romantic, visionary, fantastic, and degenerate - before artists return to sensationally oriented experiencing per se. .	baroque

CONSTABLE: FLATFORD MILL ('SCENE ON A NAVIGABLE RIVER') 1816-7 - oil on canvas - 101.6 x 133 cm - Tate Britain ... in process Constable is entering the external world with an attitude of subservience to its perceived reality that has never before been expressed at this level of apprehension of the complexity of its detail, the variety of its objects, and their astonishing cooption (within an arbitrarily chosen rectangle) in a visually ordered holistic 'view' that even elicits from ones (peculiar) brain a feedback-response of 'beauty'!	HENRY THOMPSON: THE RAISING OF JAIRUS' DAUGHTER exhibited RA 1820 - British - oil on canvas - 241.4 x 299 cm - Tate Britain ... in process This huge piece of (in its mental-subject/visual-formulation/physical-technique)//(in all its aspects) derivative nonsense, is hanging (03-2018) next to Constable's Flatford Mill (previous picture) which pre-dates this painting's exhibition date by at least three years! The little Constable, in the context of this contrast, can be used to represent the next obvious redirection of consciousness since the last huge paradigm shift from Gothic to Renaissance. . TEMP VERSION - TATE-B~~ REDO PIC

PART 2: THE CUSP BETWEEN RENAISSANCE & THE 20TH CENTURY - RE-APPREHENSION OF VISUAL & SOLIDITY SENSATIONS ... in process

The debasement of Renaissance experiential culture and its final 're-renaissance' in the late 19th century, are precursors of a new experiential paradigm that opened in the early 20th century.

The experiential potentials of means of perception, mediated via Renaissance painting, were almost exhausted by the 19th century. Painting's experiential exploration had devolved into methods of picture-manufacture, and its means of depiction were separated from its subject-matter. This morgification of painting (institutionalised in the 19th and early 20thC art academies) initiated an exploitation by artists of its last uncorrupted experiential aspect: immediate sensations untrammeled by 'socially significant' subject-matter. Thus the last experiential endeavor of the 'Renaissance' was an investment in as direct as possible sight and apprehension of external physical solidity; it was as if, at the moment of almost complete exhaustion of its potential for discovery, that that culture was returned to its origins: its investigation and experiential substantiation of the visual structure of the external world, but this time stripped of arbitrary subject-matter. The externally sourced sensations themselves were finally - after 4 centuries of applying the potential of 'external-spatial-depiction' for proving//substantiating//actualising (in the apprehension of the viewers of that time) the external reality of socially valued and sacred objects and persons - allowed to be in themselves the objective 'subject-matter'. The external world was de-populated of mentally-crafted and sacred ('from beyond its limits') objects and the world was itself identified as sensation. With the now falsely located subject-matters expunged, the way was cleared for a new physical><mental experiential reality-structure whose sensational forms were initiated via early 20th century artworks by Picasso, Ernst, et al. ... in process

Though sensations of visibility and solidity are separate modes of apprehending the 'external world', we automatically - via an 'internal' mental faculty - construct our apprehension of space and objects from visual cues (perspective scale etc), so that in effect we can 'touch at a distance'. This 'physical' apprehension of distance, position, solidity (without body contact) can be enhanced//focussed in ones//via attention. Certain artists of this 'cusp' period (spanning the end of the 19th and start of the 20th centuries), which corresponded to the exhaustion/degeneration of the discovery-potentials of the 'Renaissance', (an exhaustion expressed in the degenerate codified art-production typical of the art academies : the Ecole des Beaux Art, etc), in effect 'cleansed the Augean stables' by returning attention and working motivation to as direct-as-possible sensation. Both Manet and later Monet submerged themselves in the activity of externalising their vision - Manet grasping at the immediately perceived preseent structure of encountered scenes, Monet treating the picture as a sort of projection screen on which to accumulate his visual sensations as immediately as possible. At the other end of the sensation continuum, Cézanne attempted to directly perceive the solidity of external things and space, working on finding forms whose visual relating forces the brain to perceive, in spite of the physical flatness of the picture, spatial solidity and positional depth. One by one the by then encoded aspects of Renaissance art were rejected to allow the purity of the pure 'science' of sight to invest their whole work. ... in process


CONSTABLE: HADLEIGH CASTLE c1828-9 - oil on canvas - 122.6 x 167.3cm - Tate Britain, London This powerfully magnificent sensation-saturated image is, at its most superficial end, just that - an image. The actual scene, however sensationally presented, and of course sensed thus by the artist, is distilled and filtered into a picture, one whose conviction partly rests in a tradition of evoking emotional effects by the arrangement of confrontations (eg: the empty tower and the distant space of sea / the small man facing a summation of his vast location in the towering clouds). A romantic drama - the 'reality' of whose effects are endorsed and balanced by the actuality of the physical sensations that affirm their forms - sensations culled via many hours spent directly transposing external visual events into corresponding forms and marks of paint. How different and cleared of any bludgeoning traditions is the Corot, which simply reports a 'chance' portion of the visual field whose 'meaning' consists only in the automatic catching of the eye's attention by the (almost) central tower. .	COROT: THE ROMAN CAMPAGNA, WITH THE CLAUDIAN AQUEDUCT prob 1826 - oil on paper on canvas - 22.8 x 34 cm - NG London A landscape in direct sight - not a 'model' or perspectively informed construct - just a simple report of his direct sensations of standing in this view. His attention is focussed on the mid-distant tower, near his position the ground is perceived but not considered, not in focussed attention.

TURNER: ROUGH SEA c1840-5 / 91.4 x 121.9cm / oil on canvas / Tate Britain, London Probably an 'unfinished' picture or (like Constable's) a full-sized 'sketch'. However this could be catagorised as the 'hidden' stage of the emergence of a type of art-mediated experience that would only openly manifest in the 20th C. The painter apparently seeks to merge in his present awareness the sensational phenomenon and his acts of painting it. The eschewing of a traditional morally/socially significant subject matter (which he almost always, at least smuggles into his 'finished' paintings); his total immersion in the significance of any immediately realised experience (and the consequent rejection of all academic credos) heralds the future functionality of art.	DEGAS: PRINCESS PAULINE DE METTERNICH about 1865 - oil on canvas - 41 x 29 cm - NG London A present instant captured - originally by a camera. Now the character of this momentary image and its subject-origin is deliberately introduced into portrait painting, a medium that historically attempts to endorse most solidly the presence and the substance of the sitter now reports the substance of a momentary glance.

MANET: CORNER OF A CAFÉ-CONCERT prob 1878-80 - oil on canvas - 97.1 x 77.5 cm (this started as half of a larger picture of 1878, and was then enlarged to the right) - NG London ... in process Attention (and its attendant focus) flickers around - mainly in the foreground of this visualised place. This extraordinary picture takes as its 'subject' the ordinary random wandering of our distracted awareness, it has no pretensions to conveying any visually-distilled/unified 'useable meaning'. It's perhaps ironic that in its background and almost completely unregarded, is a presentation of a traditional theatrical spectacle. .	MANET: THE HOUSE AT REUIL 1882 / oil / 92.3 x 71.5 cm / Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin After the visually constructed subjects of the Renaissance and of academic paintings of the 19C, this astonishingly realistic image looks as transient, uncomposed and inconsequential as real (in between intention and goal) experiencing. its main content is an event that we had been taught - by preceding centuries of art endeavor - to consider utterly without significant meaning, to have no mental substance commensurate with visual monumentalising (painting was generally used and admired as an art of results not of investigations). It depicts a moment of visual attention cut like a film frame from our approach to a house ... while passing peripherally noticed herbage beside the driveway one focuses on ones goal, its doorway, momentarily hidden behind an undefinitely noticed tree. Its affect goes beyond visual reporting because its structure is such a precise report of such a typical cross-sectional moment in the midst of executing an intended act. As one walks towards ones goal (the entry of the house) ones sense of intention is momentarily muddled by a (visually-obtrusive yet irrelevant) foreground thing. As the picture-viewer I experienced this jolt to my certainty//intention as a moment so realistically corporeal as to engage a complex of senses and (even) physical responses in the immediate perception ... this painting is not only a report about the external world but an invoker, indeed an actualiser of experiences of being and acting in it. This picture confirms that what is meaningful was entering a new phase - the externally envisioned is being superceded by sensory experience that includes the viewer's being-participation Compared with this sensational adventure the Corot [see above] is a very simple visual moment. .

CÉZANNE: THE ARTIST'S FATHER, READING "L' ÉVÉNEMENT" 1866 - oil on canvas - 198.5 x 119.3 cm - NG WASHINGTON ... in process #	CÉZANNE: THE BATHER 1885 - oil on canvas - 127 x 96.8 cm - MOMA, NEW YORK ... in process This extraordinary (almost completely successful) effort to make tactilely and visibly tangible the presence of a solid object in/and its corresponding space, more completely than any previous historical picture (including, or rather especially, the most perfect tromp l'oeil). To do so in a way that bends the flat surface in the attentive perception of the viewer (without resorting to - by the late 19thC illusory - means such as perspective) .

CÉZANNE: MADAME CÉZANNE IN A RED DRESS 1888~90 - oil on canvas - 116.5 x 89.5 cm - MET, NEW YORK ... in process # .	MONET: THE JAPANESE BRIDGE around 1919~24 - oil on canvas - ## x ## cm - NG London (loan) ... in process The whole painting-surface plus external-subject has become a perception of a single massive form. .


PICASSO: LANDSCAPE WITH BRIDGE spring 1909 - oil on canvas - 81 x 100 cm - Veletržní Palác, National Gallery, Prague ... in process An extraordinarily complex mass of multi-related forms which however demands to be seen all at once as a single object. This picture (still - even after 104 years) sets up in ones attention an acute condition of active demand to encompass all its spatial relations simultaneously! The act and problem of taking a spatially real landscape and - without compromising with (by the late 19C) non-experiential painting techniques of traditional visual illusionism - compressing it into the form of a painting that is directly sensational, is a motivation of this extraordinary development in art (and a correlative//precursor of its #contextual# culture's increasingly multivalent experiencing). ---- ...	PICASSO: WOMAN - HEAD AND SHOULDERS 1909-1910 - oil on canvas - 73 x 60 cm - Pompidou Centre, Paris ... in process

Georges Braque, 1908, Maisons et arbre, oil on canvas, 40.5 x 32.5 cm, Lille Métropole Museum of Modern Art

PICASSO: 'TABLAU-OBJET' - STILL-LIFE WITH CHAIR-CANING 1912 - (MUSEÉ PICASSO) The structure and functioning of this generative object of the new experiential paradigm is discussed below : The object's 'reality aspects' are manifold: The painted still-life / the printed chair-caned oil-cloth / the rope fixed to the stretcher edge 'outside the picture'. Each 'layer' relegates the layer 'below' it to 'mentality' and the layer 'above' it to 'physicality': - The tactile paint marks confer reality on the visual space and mental signs. - The printed oil cloth, as real object from outside, proves the paint-space is illusion, but has its realistic chair-caning confirmed as mental sign. - The rope, forced between image and outside, fixed to the physical picture, banishes the tromp l'oil chair-caned oil cloth, both its illusion and its substance, to the relative mental plane of the image. Because there are 3 layers the shock of realising that 'real' is identity of mental and physical is confirmed! NB: In the art of the previous cultural period (Renaissance to late 19thC) this relation of illusion and object is (only) potential - vis: - Tromp l'oeil, whose illusions are marvellous in so far as they 'tromp' their physical support. - The duality of subject and paint was fully developed in the late 19thC: Courbet, Monet, Cézanne. However not even they achieved the dual-unity of subject and the physical 'painting'.	MARCEL DUCHAMP: "FOUNTAIN" - CERAMIC URINAL WITH 'SIGNATURE' & DATE 1917 ... in process 'Collaged' into an open art exhibition, the resulting experiential form includes: urinal in an art show ! - the clash of "R. MUTT" and 'signature' - the complex exchanges between urinal and "Fountain" (sculpture, drinking) exacerbated by the position of the object - the transformed exhibition event, the submission procedures, the sudden visibility of the question "what is art" (certainly not an exhibit in this exhibition !). It's a shockingly 'naked' intrusion into the by-then comfortable zone of collage - its 'found-object' is collaged onto the tableau of the 'outside' world! It's an 'objet' that is associatively about as opposite from its contemporary Art as is possible - it breaks (the 'mould of') synthetic cubism completely open again (more open than the first 1912 papier-colle must have been). It brings art (at least for art's spectators) to a standstill, it makes a ('disgustingly') familiar object unique, but//yet also superficially seemed to baptise any existing object's potentiality as art, however this was to ignore the fact that this particular object originated as a choice - which inevitably brought it into the world of meanings; that it was titled "Fountain", which with its spatial re-orientation and consequent evoked an associational context (for me) of ; 'signed' "R. Mutt 1917"; re-positioned; inserted into a particular alien context. .----------------- It's a shockingly naked intrusion into the by-then comfortable zone of collage - its an 'objet-trouvé' that is collaged onto the tableau of the utterly familiar meanings of the social world! It's an 'objet' that is associatively about as opposite from its contemporary Art as is possible - it solves the 'modern-art' subject-matter problem - vis the historically familiar subjects that support even the radical reality-reformulations of synthetic cubism, it breaks s-c's confining historical mould, its artistically 'normal' subject-matter. It brings into a public position of uniqueness an object that has conceptually an almost hidden//negated existence - a common thing and associated act that has almost no social expression//meaning it forces than the first 1912 papier-colle must have been). It brings art (at least for art's spectators) to a standstill, it makes a ('disgustingly') familiar object unique, but//yet also superficially seemed to baptise any existing object's potentiality as art, however this assertion ignores the fact that this particular object originated as a choice which inevitably brought it into the world of meanings; that it was titled "Fountain" which with its physical re-orientation and consequently evoked (for me) an associational context of 'ornamental water-control'; that it was 'signed' "R. Mutt 1917", which mocked its originality and confirmed its vulgarity; inserted into the particular alien context of useless but uplifting art. The choice of this ultimately humble object as an art object (: its insertion into an art exh) - consequent suggestion - on one hand - that Any object could posture as an art-object - that thus art-objects had no value - its especially low (if not "disgusting") social meaning//status/responses, that its new context however flatulated//focussed so that its socially nurtured//## meanings became its (only) subject-matter (as it were in parallel with this Chosen-as-Unique object). Thus the completely newly modern Modern-Art of Conceptualism was born.

MAX ERNST: "2 CHILDREN THREATENED BY A NIGHTINGALE" 1924 - COLLAGE & OIL-PAINT ON WOOD - 18 x 13in - (MOMA, NY) ... in process



MAX ERNST: "UNE SEMAINE DE BONTÉ" - BOOK-3 / #17 1934 - Paris [reserve ... in process	MAX ERNST: "UBU ENCHAINÉ" THEATRE SET 1937 - Production: Sylvain Itkine - Paris [reserve ... in process


ILYA KABAKOV: 1965 - BOARD-BOX, PEPRO OF A RUISDAEL PAINTING & PAPIER-MÂCHÉ ARM

rothko

ANDY WARHOL: (elec-chair)	A. R. PENCK: UNTITLED (SYSTEM PAINTING) 1966 - oil on canvas - 109.5 x 95 cm - Michael Werner Gallery ... in process