The Taschen Collection: Art of our time
By Marga Paz
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The emergence of modern psychology, and especially of psychoanalysis, was based on the conviction that knowledge of the "ego" would enable the individual to free himself from the tyrannical imposition of social mores. It is therefore not surprising that, in the eyes of our current society, the public sphere appears exclusively as a source of impositions; in the face of which modern man makes his personal history and his own emotions prevail. As a result, a culture of narcissism has been created in which only that which is near and immediate counts.
For many current artists, the private has become increasingly important compared to the public. The penchant for exposing the best-kept secrets of their own intimacy to the eyes of others with a complete lack of inhibition, is articulated by Dominique Baqué: "As is well-known, the private is revealed as one of the higher states which enables a large part of the artistic productions of today to be captured. Starting from a guiding principle that owes a great deal to psychoanalysis - in which everything is spoken about and externalized, nothing is hidden, and devotion and abandonment to free association without the fear of any type of censure prevails - "intimate" works mistrust great works and History only to withdraw into fragments of personal life, frequently delivered to the spectator without either narrative explanation or chronological coherence, just to re-emerge in micro-histories or in a "given instant". The relationship of these works to the failure of the "great novels" as presaged by Jean François Lyotard, to the crumbling of ideologies and to the fragmentation of the social mass into "tribes" with their own particular codes, rites and symbols which make them recognizable is thus undeniable; these are works that are generated taking the model of the literary autobiography as their basis."
As early as the 1970s, artists - like Larry Clark, Robert Frank, et al. - adopted this tendency to draft a sort of intimate diary in which their body and their personal history acquired a heretofore unheard of role as protagonist. Richard Sennet articulated this when he said: "The 'I' of each individual has become his or her heaviest burden. Knowing oneself has become the objective and an end in itself instead of being a means of knowing the world."
The 1980s fuelled this trend, and concepts such as autobiography, trauma, relationships with others, memory and identity took on a leading role, as seen in works by artists such as Nan Goldin, Christian Boltanski, Larry Clark, Nobuyoshi Araki, Mike Kelley, Cindy Sherman and Martin Kippenberger.
Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
The emergence of modern psychology, and especially of psychoanalysis, was based on the conviction that knowledge of the "ego" would enable the individual to free himself from the tyrannical imposition of social mores. It is therefore not surprising that, in the eyes of our current society, the public sphere appears exclusively as a source of impositions; in the face of which modern man makes his personal history and his own emotions prevail. As a result, a culture of narcissism has been created in which only that which is near and immediate counts.
For many current artists, the private has become increasingly important compared to the public. The penchant for exposing the best-kept secrets of their own intimacy to the eyes of others with a complete lack of inhibition, is articulated by Dominique Baqué: "As is well-known, the private is revealed as one of the higher states which enables a large part of the artistic productions of today to be captured. Starting from a guiding principle that owes a great deal to psychoanalysis - in which everything is spoken about and externalized, nothing is hidden, and devotion and abandonment to free association without the fear of any type of censure prevails - "intimate" works mistrust great works and History only to withdraw into fragments of personal life, frequently delivered to the spectator without either narrative explanation or chronological coherence, just to re-emerge in micro-histories or in a "given instant". The relationship of these works to the failure of the "great novels" as presaged by Jean François Lyotard, to the crumbling of ideologies and to the fragmentation of the social mass into "tribes" with their own particular codes, rites and symbols which make them recognizable is thus undeniable; these are works that are generated taking the model of the literary autobiography as their basis."
As early as the 1970s, artists - like Larry Clark, Robert Frank, et al. - adopted this tendency to draft a sort of intimate diary in which their body and their personal history acquired a heretofore unheard of role as protagonist. Richard Sennet articulated this when he said: "The 'I' of each individual has become his or her heaviest burden. Knowing oneself has become the objective and an end in itself instead of being a means of knowing the world."
The 1980s fuelled this trend, and concepts such as autobiography, trauma, relationships with others, memory and identity took on a leading role, as seen in works by artists such as Nan Goldin, Christian Boltanski, Larry Clark, Nobuyoshi Araki, Mike Kelley, Cindy Sherman and Martin Kippenberger.
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