Zarko Bozinov - Abstract Artist
Belgian &
- acrylic on belgian linnen
- 200 x 120 cm
- 1998
- $2000
A SHORT HISTORY
Before modernism, significant works of art often functioned as escapism by dramatizing incidents in history that glorified the participants and conveyed some exemplary missive to viewers. A hundred years ago, French author Gustave Flaubert decried, "Life is so horrible that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of art." Western art, at least as written and taught by art historians, critics, and museum curators, followed a social Darwinist linear evolution with each major art style acting as a reaction to or commentary on what came before. The viewer's role was as passive receiver of the works' unequivocal moral instructions.
For most of the 20th century, abstract art was considered the necessary and inevitable culmination of art history. As modernism evolved through the century, recognizable content disappeared, and painting's role became to suggest spiritual states rather than to describe or imitate optical reality. Artists concentrated on the formal qualities of the medium and on self-expression, with the viewer's role that of passive appreciator. Often modernist art was granted the status of holy relic and invested with mysterious, cryptic powers, its proper interpretation available only to a small, elitist group of art insiders.
Pop art in the 1960s marked a temporary return of realism, in which recognizable items from consumer culture became the subject matter for major paintings. Reflecting the vast increase in modern communication, Pop art opened the art world, breaking down distinctions between "high" and "popular" culture. After a few years, however, the mainstream of contemporary art in the United States quickly moved away from painting with new movements such as minimalism, which emphasized the formal materials that made up the works to the exclusion of subject matter, and conceptualism, which dispensed altogether with the notion of art as physical object. For the next decade, art was valued for its separateness from reality; it was considered independent of all but the most self-referential context. To understand and experience the power of this work, the viewer had to be indoctrinated into the mysterious, exclusive world of structuralist and feminist art theory.
Since the 1980s, as the general public lost interest in art that had no meaning or impact on their daily lives, art began to regionalize, incorporating global traditions and formerly ignored or marginalized aesthetics, concerns, and subject matter. Many artists, associating the medium of painting with the past, turned instead to new technologies to create their work. The result was an end-of-the-millennium inventorying of the century's critical insights and a collapsing of any notion of a singular history of art.
Recently, after a several-decade-long hiatus, a growing number of artists have returned to painting as a medium, proving the lasting power and satisfaction still gained by seeing the results of controlling viscous pigments on a two-dimensional surface.
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