Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde: From the Pursuit of the Primordial to the Nihilism of Narcissism
- 2 Preliminary Therapeutic Attitude: The Provocative Object as a Path to Primordiality – Picasso and Duchamp
- 3 The Geometrical Cure: Art as a Matter of Principle – Mondrian and Malevich
- 4 The Expressive Cure: Art as the Recovery of Primal Emotion – Expressionism and Surrealism
- 5 Fame as the Cure-All: The Charisma of Cynicism – Andy Warhol
- 6 Enchanting the Disenchanted: The Artist's Last Stand – Joseph Beuys
- 7 The Decadence or Cloning and Coding of the Avant-Garde: Appropriation Art
- Notes
- Index
2 - Preliminary Therapeutic Attitude: The Provocative Object as a Path to Primordiality – Picasso and Duchamp
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde: From the Pursuit of the Primordial to the Nihilism of Narcissism
- 2 Preliminary Therapeutic Attitude: The Provocative Object as a Path to Primordiality – Picasso and Duchamp
- 3 The Geometrical Cure: Art as a Matter of Principle – Mondrian and Malevich
- 4 The Expressive Cure: Art as the Recovery of Primal Emotion – Expressionism and Surrealism
- 5 Fame as the Cure-All: The Charisma of Cynicism – Andy Warhol
- 6 Enchanting the Disenchanted: The Artist's Last Stand – Joseph Beuys
- 7 The Decadence or Cloning and Coding of the Avant-Garde: Appropriation Art
- Notes
- Index
Summary
What mattered was an attitude, more than an influence. …
Marcel DuchampIt is a relief when an individual is able to be mad and to be serious and to enjoy the relief afforded by a sense of humour, and to be able, so to speak, to flirt with the psychoses. Through modern art we experience the undoing of the processes that constitute sanity and psycho-neurotic defence organisations, and the safety-first principle.
D. W. WinnicottFame, we might say, is narcissistic compensation for therapeutic failure. What is therapeutic success? More particularly, what is the nature of the health gained by therapeutic success? The basic contention of this book is that the avant-garde artist makes his art to restore himself to health, an intention that not only informs his art but influences his public's perception of that art. That is, his art may or may not have therapeutic effect, however limited or extensive, but its therapeutic intention becomes its context of significance, the source of its value. Historically, every art dead-ends in the aesthetic; it becomes a decadent object of aesthetic contemplation, a formal conceit, or, as Robert Motherwell says, a kind of pleasingly organized “surface [for] the senses” – a form of visual flattery. But as he observes, it must have “an ethic” underneath its aesthetic surface, have ethical purpose even to be aesthetically engaging. To begin to take it seriously the perceiver must be unconsciously convinced that it stands in some sort of ethical relationship to him, that it has good intentions toward him, however “bad” it may look according to conventional aesthetic standards.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist , pp. 28 - 39Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993