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SOMETHING IS HAPPENING
Author(s) -
SHIFF RICHARD
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
art history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1467-8365
pISSN - 0141-6790
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8365.2005.00487.x
Subject(s) - happening , representation (politics) , meaning (existential) , criticism , painting , art , art history , literature , aesthetics , history , philosophy , epistemology , performance art , law , politics , political science
In The True Vine (1989), Stephen Bann assumes the role of Nietzschean ‘antiquarian’, a historian attentive to the slightest residues of material culture, the kind of historical evidence overlooked, or disregarded, by those more concerned either to monumentalize the existing historical record or fundamentally to shift its understanding. Bann's approach to history accommodates a certain modernist sense of the inexhaustible excess of meaning to be found within any material practice, an attitude towards media of representation here associated with the art criticism of Clement Greenberg but, all the more so, with the pragmatic philosophy of C.S. Peirce. Adopting Bann's ‘antiquarian’ spirit, this essay probes the cultural significance of the material factor in painting, photography, film, video and forms of digitized electronic display.