Exercise 5.2 Reverse the Barr Chart.

What would be the significance of reversing the arrows in Barr’s chart?

“Make two columns- one ‘forwards’ the other ‘back’. List as many relevant concepts as you are able to develop the contrast between the two columns”.

I feel as if I am being encouraged to be clever, for the sheer hell of it. I am thinking back to Sokal’s spoof thesis of part three, knowing that I could write something, and somebody who knew nothing of such things would read it, and say, gosh. That’s clever. Big words, and concepts and theories. The instructions make no sense, I don’t want to write about something I don’t understand, other than to say that I don’t understand it.

My frustration with the Barr Chart rumbles on. Why is the only then-living artist, Brancusi, stuck in the middle un-categorised? Should his name not be in a red box? Why is futurism not connected to modern architecture and in turn, why is modern architecture in a black box with nothing connecting it to either abstract art-stream? What do the dotted lines mean- does that mean a sort of implicit influence and if so, why isn’t the line joining Bauhaus and modern architecture a solid one?

My frustrations do not lie with the Barr Chart itself, interestingly, I have just spotted on-line at Christies, a “price realized” entry for one of Alfred Barr’s catalogues. At auction it was estimated that it would reach $300 to $400. It actually went under gavel for $2,500. Such is the value that The Establishment has placed upon this hallowed object. Its importance, then, is clear; I acknowledge that. It is an important piece of material culture, pertaining to a ground-breaking exhibition that literally changed the way art was exhibited. I am struggling with the relevance, let alone the meaning of this exercise, I have literally no idea how to approach it.

Instead in the interim, I have simply removed the arrows completely.

I’m going to leave this here; I’m going around and around in circles trying to find a way forward with this, have hand-written charts and columns, and screwed them all up into missiles for the waste-paper basket. Hopefully, a penny might drop, and I can re-visit this.

Fast forward a few weeks. I have been in touch with my tutor, who has advised that this exercise is simply about looking at Barr’s chart and deciding on which movements are thesis, which are antithesis and which are synthesis. An extension of exercise 4.5 then, about dialectic, in which I looked at Cubism and Dada. Let’s take that entire strand then, and follow the arrows from Neo-impressionism through Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism to end up at the non-geometric branch of Abstract art. I have made a chart of sorts, to pick out relevant concepts.

The common strand of all of them, is “breaking down” and this is key to Greenberg’s concepts of modernism, that the aim was to keep reducing down unnecessary elements until art could reach its purest state. But not all the “breaking down” was in order to achieve this kind of state of artistic Greenbergian Nirvana; much of it was to shake off irrelevant bits according to the particular art movement. In this sense, Dada was the closest to a pure thesis, or a movement with no precedent: emerging as it did in neutral Switzerland as, I would say, a pure and stand-alone reactionary art-form. That is not to say there were not influences from previous movements: as discussed in exercise 4.5.

Barr’s Chart has always reminded me of a Harris matrix, or the method archaeologists use to chart different deposits at an excavation. Take this quote from our UVC manual, (page 122) which is related to the piece- or column of air- of 1967, called Frameworks:

Such works were produced in part to challenge the critical orthodoxy of modernism, not simply to gaze upon a whimsical thought experiment. The authority of the critic in the art world was an instance of cultural authority per se. So conceptual artists making obscure gestures for the attention of artists and critics were nonetheless making political gestures… By the early 1970s that particular gesture was over and done with and arguably Conceptual Art was the last art movement of modern art. Had Alfred Barr extended his chart beyond ‘Cubism and Abstract Art’ he would have arrived at Conceptual Art as a terminus. Not that there would be no more names and dates to add, merely that the connecting arrows would be absent.

I put the last two sentences in italics, because this is the relevant bit, to a Harris Matrix.

The Matrix has no arrows, as it is presented in a chronological order with numbered boxes. A true Harris matrix has more in common with a modern London Tube really, but the point is, there are no arrows, just interconnecting lines to show the relationship between deposits. If then, one considers art movements as deposits of Visual Culture, the Barr chart could be continued, but as a Harris Matrix of names and stylistic variances. There is no longer any distinct thesis/antithesis/synthesis. The point is, of course, that it is very easy to say that Conceptual Art was the terminus of movements, because we are live, in the moment. What we have now, is a series of deposits which have yet to make it into the Harris version of the Barr Chart, because they are still on the surface.

Bibliography

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Demonstration-of-construction-of-a-simple-Harris-Matrix-right-that-represents-the_fig1_51684667 accessed 15 April 2020