The Creation
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THE FUNCTION OF THE IMAGINATION
For art, the patricidal act of severing itself from tradition and con- vention is equally suicidal, the self-hatred of the artist expressed in eliminating the hand, typical of the art of the last two decades, can only lead to the death of painting. Such a powerful wish to annihilate personal expression implies that the artist does not love his creation.
Here describes the use of ambiguous, manipulated, and isolated imagery in order
to force viewers to engage their imaginations and give their own meanings to the paintings. Indeterminacy and pictorial illusion are seen as the key elements
in depicting the complexities of sapien contemporary experience —elements which
were forbidden by modernist theory.
Although each artist's use and treatment of imagery is different, the
conceptualization and function of the image is often similar. By exploring
the choice and treatment of recognizable forms in ART, certain descriptive generalizations can be made about the work of these imagists.
The imagists, toward the same end, have drawn from these varying features of recent art and have conjoined seemingly different attitudes and concerns. By acknowledging and assimilating the salient aspects of recent American art, these contemporary artists have been able effectively to employ, manipulate, and revitalize imagery.
There is now a phenomenon abroad in the land called, among other things, " 'bad' painting," "new image" painting, "new wave" painting, "punk art" and "stupid" art.
Nevertheless, exhumed conventions can still be exhausted ones.
The problem with painting, particularly abstract painting, is that by now all the
possible significant variations on neat/messy, thick/thin, big/little, simple/
complex, or circle/square have been done.
One final way of attacking the problem of making a "good" painting
without succumbing to its manifest cliches might, for lack of a more precise
term, be called fetish-ism: adopting the look of obsessive, or ritualistic, or
simply non-Western art-making activity.
The meanings and associations applied to an image cannot be completely obliterated