Discussion question from this week.
Rosalind Krauss, in "The Motivation of the Sign," which we read for last week and were to review for this week, narrated Picasso’s skepticism about vision's capacity to reach the body. She dicusses the problematic of physical presence that Picasso explored in the Horta de Hebro paintings of 1909. In Picasso’s Analytic cubism, sight and touch become radically dissociated, they are not transparent to one another, as demonstrated in the violent oscillations of the lozenge shape. Picasso elaborates this problematic consistently, to the point where he developes a new system of image making in which what "motivates," or "inspires" the grapheme (the painterly mark) is the very carnality that is missing -- hence it drives the production of signs. We might describe this as he withdrawal of touch from the field of the visual. This is predicated upon understanding the sign as grounded in a system of absence and difference. By 1912, Krauss argues, Picasso has found another solution to this problem of the inaccessability of the three dimensional "real" on a 2-d support. Cubism enfolds the street at the level of poetics, not the politics of everyday life. Here, newspaper is mobilized as the medium of modernity itself, but one that permits the refutation of modernity’s expropriation of subjectivity from within modernity’s own vehicle.
1. Based on this argument, what precisely does expropriation mean? (Please extrapolate from the text; please do not simply give me a definition from Merriem Webster). Please attempt to define it in a brief paragraph.
Krauss goes on to say that the social and political is always immanent to the aesthetic. Here, she uses Bakhtin: “There is no experience outside itself its embodiment in signs, no qualitative difference between interior and exterior, it is not experience that organizes expression, but expression that organizes experience.†This is Krauss's response to Crow that the “reality†of materials explains nothing of the subtle linguistic operations of collage. Instead, mass newsprint is part of the Mallarmean reversal. “If there is poetry in the street, it is at the level of poetry that it is in the street.â€
2. In a brief paragrpah, how might you paraphrase and explain this thought, that "If there is poetry in the street, it is at the level of poetry that it is in the street."
I never really understand what she's asking us to talk about :rofl1:
