Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Plates
- Acknowledgements
- Section A Introduction
- Section B Continuum, 1952–1961
- Section C Abundance, 1961–1971
- 1 Arrival in the USA and ‘Clemsville’
- 2 Junk art
- 3 American Pop
- 4 Curator at the Guggenheim
- 5 Six Painters and the Object and Six More, 1963
- 6 Other writings on Pop
- 7 Art as human evidence
- 8 Alexander Liberman and Paul Feeley
- 9 Systemic Painting, 1966
- 10 Abstraction and iconogra
- 11 The communications network
- 12 Departure from the Guggenheim
- 13 Exile in Carbondale
- 14 Arts Magazine
- 15 Arts Magazine
- 16 Return to New York: SVA, SUNY, and The Nation
- 17 Options
- 18 Expanding and disappearing works of art
- 19 Alloway's Nation criticism
- 20 Newness and the avant-garde
- 21 Post-Minimal radicalism
- 22 Historical revisions: Abstract Expressionism and Picasso
- 23 Mass communications
- 24 Film criticism
- 25 Violent America
- 26 Pluralism as a ‘unifying theory’
- Section D Alternatives, 1971–1988
- Section E Summary and Conclusion
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Platesection
15 - Arts Magazine
from Section C - Abundance, 1961–1971
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Plates
- Acknowledgements
- Section A Introduction
- Section B Continuum, 1952–1961
- Section C Abundance, 1961–1971
- 1 Arrival in the USA and ‘Clemsville’
- 2 Junk art
- 3 American Pop
- 4 Curator at the Guggenheim
- 5 Six Painters and the Object and Six More, 1963
- 6 Other writings on Pop
- 7 Art as human evidence
- 8 Alexander Liberman and Paul Feeley
- 9 Systemic Painting, 1966
- 10 Abstraction and iconogra
- 11 The communications network
- 12 Departure from the Guggenheim
- 13 Exile in Carbondale
- 14 Arts Magazine
- 15 Arts Magazine
- 16 Return to New York: SVA, SUNY, and The Nation
- 17 Options
- 18 Expanding and disappearing works of art
- 19 Alloway's Nation criticism
- 20 Newness and the avant-garde
- 21 Post-Minimal radicalism
- 22 Historical revisions: Abstract Expressionism and Picasso
- 23 Mass communications
- 24 Film criticism
- 25 Violent America
- 26 Pluralism as a ‘unifying theory’
- Section D Alternatives, 1971–1988
- Section E Summary and Conclusion
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Platesection
Summary
Perhaps a book on the Venice Biennale promised to be a cathartic experience following the traumatic events of 1966. Although the original idea for a book was not Alloway's, it opened up a new and fruitful development in his thinking about art: “What I propose… is an outline of the Biennale as an organization, one that in its history touches on unsettled problems of art in society. There are many studies of artists, schools of art, media, and iconography, but not much has been written on the distribution of art.” The Venice Biennale: from salon to goldfish bowl was a history of the Biennale from its 1895 origin, to 1968, when the book was published, but it would be far more than a survey of art and artists at the event—it would take account of the institutionalization and contextualization of the art:
Big exhibitions are artificial environments, somewhere between carnivals and museums. They are dependent, of course, on the mobility of works of art, as they are taken from original sites and permanent repositories with a freedom equal to that with which a critic selects photographs for reproduction. In this respect, a recurring exhibition like the Biennale is more like the drive-in movie theatre than the museum from which some of its exhibits may be borrowed. It is originals that are being spun around the world, and so to speak, inserted, into a core of permanent services at the exhibition ground. The particular relation of scale and facture, experienced only in the presence of the original works of art, is preserved, but in contexts that can change as fast as conversation. These contextual shifts have meant that works of art acquire additional comparative meanings as their company changes. The theoretical absoluteness of art has been modified by the mobility of art in successive man-made environments.
He concluded that, true to Information Theory thinking, art and artists at the Biennale would need to be seen as “part of a communication system.”
A conventional account at the time might have interpreted the history of the Biennale as the liberation of art out of academic “Salon” conventions, toward individual expression.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Art and PluralismLawrence Alloway’s Cultural Criticism, pp. 231 - 236Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012