‘Cultural Imperialism’?
‘Cultural Imperialism’?
复制标题
“文化帝国主义”？
DOI：
10.1080/09528820802013016
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发表时间：
2008
期刊：
影响因子：
0.2
通讯作者：
Nigel S. Whiteley
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Nigel S. Whiteley
In his catalogue introduction to the 1957 exhibition Dimensions: British Abstract Art 1948–1957, Lawrence Alloway divides the art in the exhibition into ‘painterly’and ‘geometric’. The former term is then subdivided into ‘allusive’and ‘non-figurative’, while the latter incorporates ‘rigorous’ and ‘non-rigorous’. By ‘rigorous’, Alloway had in mind the British Constructivist tradition of art and artists such as Kenneth and Mary Martin, Anthony Hill and John Ernest;‘non-rigorous’ includes Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Robert Adams and Adrian Heath. Alloway accepts that these categorisations are a ‘convenient, not an absolute arrangement’, 1 and that, in practice, there are crossovers and connections, but it provides a useful mapping of abstract art in Britain in the period. Extending the convenience, we can describe what was to become known as ‘Hard Edge’painting as a trajectory out of the ‘geometric’base, combining aspects of both its ‘rigorous’ and ‘nonrigorous’ tendencies.Yet this would be to reduce to stylistic characteristics something culturally far richer and more complex. In this essay, I do not intend to approach ‘Hard Edge’just stylistically but to place it in its broader cultural and historical context. I also argue that the establishment and development of Hard Edge painting does not simply represent a shift of artworld power from Paris to New York. It is not merely a new phase of American influence, replacing a romantic, gestural Abstract Expressionist aesthetic with a cool, graphic Post-Painterly abstract one. Hard Edge primarily represents a significant shift in culture and attitudes, and expresses the arrival in Britain of an era of modernity that celebrates the urban experience of dynamism, impact, change and expendability. However, it might also be seen as either the Americanisation of British art, or Modernism’s final fling–the death throe of an ethnocentric, monocultural orthodoxy.
