Filip Lipinski
Filip Lipiński, associate professor at the Department of Art History at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. His professional interests concern American art, medium-related theories in art history and visual culture, painting in the context of film and photography and methodology of art history. He was a Fulbright Fellow at City University of New York (2007-8), recipient of Terra Foundation for American Art Summer Residency in France (2008) and Terra Travel Grant in the United States (2013); JFK Institute Research Grant at Free Universitat (2019), Kościuszko Foundation Fellowship at University of Southern California, Los Angeles (2019); member of AICA and Polish Association of Art Historians. Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Artium Quaestiones journal. He is the author of 2 books: Ameryka. Rewizje wizualnej mitologii Stanów Zjednoczonych [America. Revising Visual Mythology of the United States] (Poznań, 2021) and Hopper wirtualny. Obrazy w pamiętającym spojrzeniu [The Virtual Hopper. Images in a Remembering Look] (Toruń, 2013) as well as numerous academic articles and book chapters on modern and contemporary art and art theory in journals such as Oxford Art Journal, Artium Quaestiones, Quart, RIHA Journal.
less
InterestsView All (8)
Uploads
Books by Filip Lipinski
Papers by Filip Lipinski
keywords: painting; image; text; textuality; poststructuralism; American art
The article is an extensive analysis of the postmodern phenomenon of appropriation art in its practical and theoretical context. It focuses on the historical period of the late 1970s and 1980s and the New York Scene of American artists, collectively called the Pictures Generation. It was a moment when artistic practice merged with an insightful critical reflection inspired by diverse sources such as Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory, Roland Barthes analysis of myth and the idea of „the death of the author” as well as Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction. In the first part of the article I analyze photographic work of four major female artists – Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger – in terms of the strategies of appropriation they employed. It sets ground for the second part of the article – a detailed „anatomy” of critical discourse and theoretical and historical premises for the emergence or appropriation art with special focus on the allegory and allegorical procedures discussed in seminal articles by Craig Owens and Benjamin H. Buchloh. It also highlights the relationship between appropriation and the Barthesian understanding of the myth. In the third part I discuss critical reconsiderations of appropriation in terms of subjectivity and its political value. The final section consists of analyses of selected works of appropriation deconstructing „American myth” in order to demonstrate the above-mentioned political/critical dimension of appropriation. In conclusion I propose to think about postmodern appropriation not only as an important phenomenon of the past but a still operative, even if at times aporetic, project which sets major coordinates for contemporary art.
Key words: appropriation, postmodernism, allegory, mit, American art
Słowa kluczowe: zawłaszczenie, postmodernizm, alegoria, mit, sztuka amerykańska
Artykuł stanowi propozycję odczytania wybranych polskich filmów o sztuce (m.in. Wielość rzeczywistości Leona Chwistka, reż. R. Waśko; Ślad, reż. H. Włodarczyk; Sen i Obraz, reż. B. Dziworski; Bykowi chwała, reż. A. Papuziński) jako specyficznie pojmowanego laboratorium dzieła sztuki. W środowisku filmowym dochodzi do interpretacyjnej wizualizacji jego poszerzonego, wirtualnego pola, czyli czynienia widzialnym i „sprawdzania” tego, co dotychczas pozostawało w sferze intuicyjnego responsu, dyskursywnie eksplikowanej, interpretacyjnej projekcji ze strony widza/historyka sztuki czy też domniemanego horyzontu wyobrażeniowego twórcy. W pierwszej części artykułu autor zakreśla teoretyczne przesłanki takiego myślenia o typie „dokumentu kreacyjnego” w obszarze tego gatunku oraz wyjaśnia swoje rozumienie tytułowych pojęć „poszerzonego pola” oraz „wirtualności”. Kolejne dwie części tekstu stanowią analizę wybranych filmów ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem dwóch problemów: wizualizacji „życia” oraz „nieświadomości” dzieła sztuki.
The text concerns ways in which artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol critically employed the signs for American modernist painting – abstract expressionism – in order to deconstruct and overcome it. Abstract expressionism became an important element of American myth – under construction since nineteenth century – and the last grand myth providing America with the feeling of artistic and cultural identity. Referring to the conceptualization of the myth by Roland Barthes, the author points the way the painterly trace – the brushstroke – became the mythic sign of direct expression, freedom, physical presence or masculinity exemplified by Jackson Pollock and resulted in a variety of generalizations concerning the varied practices of abstract expressionism. Since 1950s a brushstroke or loose skeins of paint – traces as indexical signs of the work of painting – became rather a sign of a sign, quoted, repeated and displaced, a signifier of abstract expressionism as an already academicized visual-discoursive formation.
The following part of the article consists of analyses of specific works of art, which progressively undermine the adherence of the painterly signifiers to their alledged signifieds. First, it briefly discusses Rauschenberg’s Bed, and briefly Erased de Kooning, as examples of complex, often equivocal relationship of artists of the younger generation with their „great” predecessors, based, on the one hand, on the awareness of their debt to them – the inherited artistic language – and, on the other, the necessity to subvert it. Next, Lichtenstein’s Brushstroke series testifies to the completed process of conventionalization of painterly trace and painting as a sphere woven of quotations, always already mediated by other signs, images and forms of reproduction. Finally, Warhol in his Oxidation paintings literalized the performative, masculinity-oriented interpretations of Pollock’s action painting (and abstract expressionism as a whole) and thus – through physical repetition and literalization revealed the underlying mythological structure of such gestures.
The aim of these selected case-studies and analyses, which followed the „traces” of American modernism, is not to specify boundaries between movements nor prove the passing of one movement in favour of the other, but to indicate an ongoing active role of abstract expressionism in the decades that followed its heyday in the elusive but legible form of a paternal system of signs to be re-vised – seen again, repeated and deconstructed through artistic practices.
keywords: painting; image; text; textuality; poststructuralism; American art
The article is an extensive analysis of the postmodern phenomenon of appropriation art in its practical and theoretical context. It focuses on the historical period of the late 1970s and 1980s and the New York Scene of American artists, collectively called the Pictures Generation. It was a moment when artistic practice merged with an insightful critical reflection inspired by diverse sources such as Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory, Roland Barthes analysis of myth and the idea of „the death of the author” as well as Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction. In the first part of the article I analyze photographic work of four major female artists – Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger – in terms of the strategies of appropriation they employed. It sets ground for the second part of the article – a detailed „anatomy” of critical discourse and theoretical and historical premises for the emergence or appropriation art with special focus on the allegory and allegorical procedures discussed in seminal articles by Craig Owens and Benjamin H. Buchloh. It also highlights the relationship between appropriation and the Barthesian understanding of the myth. In the third part I discuss critical reconsiderations of appropriation in terms of subjectivity and its political value. The final section consists of analyses of selected works of appropriation deconstructing „American myth” in order to demonstrate the above-mentioned political/critical dimension of appropriation. In conclusion I propose to think about postmodern appropriation not only as an important phenomenon of the past but a still operative, even if at times aporetic, project which sets major coordinates for contemporary art.
Key words: appropriation, postmodernism, allegory, mit, American art
Słowa kluczowe: zawłaszczenie, postmodernizm, alegoria, mit, sztuka amerykańska
Artykuł stanowi propozycję odczytania wybranych polskich filmów o sztuce (m.in. Wielość rzeczywistości Leona Chwistka, reż. R. Waśko; Ślad, reż. H. Włodarczyk; Sen i Obraz, reż. B. Dziworski; Bykowi chwała, reż. A. Papuziński) jako specyficznie pojmowanego laboratorium dzieła sztuki. W środowisku filmowym dochodzi do interpretacyjnej wizualizacji jego poszerzonego, wirtualnego pola, czyli czynienia widzialnym i „sprawdzania” tego, co dotychczas pozostawało w sferze intuicyjnego responsu, dyskursywnie eksplikowanej, interpretacyjnej projekcji ze strony widza/historyka sztuki czy też domniemanego horyzontu wyobrażeniowego twórcy. W pierwszej części artykułu autor zakreśla teoretyczne przesłanki takiego myślenia o typie „dokumentu kreacyjnego” w obszarze tego gatunku oraz wyjaśnia swoje rozumienie tytułowych pojęć „poszerzonego pola” oraz „wirtualności”. Kolejne dwie części tekstu stanowią analizę wybranych filmów ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem dwóch problemów: wizualizacji „życia” oraz „nieświadomości” dzieła sztuki.
The text concerns ways in which artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol critically employed the signs for American modernist painting – abstract expressionism – in order to deconstruct and overcome it. Abstract expressionism became an important element of American myth – under construction since nineteenth century – and the last grand myth providing America with the feeling of artistic and cultural identity. Referring to the conceptualization of the myth by Roland Barthes, the author points the way the painterly trace – the brushstroke – became the mythic sign of direct expression, freedom, physical presence or masculinity exemplified by Jackson Pollock and resulted in a variety of generalizations concerning the varied practices of abstract expressionism. Since 1950s a brushstroke or loose skeins of paint – traces as indexical signs of the work of painting – became rather a sign of a sign, quoted, repeated and displaced, a signifier of abstract expressionism as an already academicized visual-discoursive formation.
The following part of the article consists of analyses of specific works of art, which progressively undermine the adherence of the painterly signifiers to their alledged signifieds. First, it briefly discusses Rauschenberg’s Bed, and briefly Erased de Kooning, as examples of complex, often equivocal relationship of artists of the younger generation with their „great” predecessors, based, on the one hand, on the awareness of their debt to them – the inherited artistic language – and, on the other, the necessity to subvert it. Next, Lichtenstein’s Brushstroke series testifies to the completed process of conventionalization of painterly trace and painting as a sphere woven of quotations, always already mediated by other signs, images and forms of reproduction. Finally, Warhol in his Oxidation paintings literalized the performative, masculinity-oriented interpretations of Pollock’s action painting (and abstract expressionism as a whole) and thus – through physical repetition and literalization revealed the underlying mythological structure of such gestures.
The aim of these selected case-studies and analyses, which followed the „traces” of American modernism, is not to specify boundaries between movements nor prove the passing of one movement in favour of the other, but to indicate an ongoing active role of abstract expressionism in the decades that followed its heyday in the elusive but legible form of a paternal system of signs to be re-vised – seen again, repeated and deconstructed through artistic practices.
The first part of the paper is devoted to a presentation of an approach which combines a phenomenological perspective focusing on the visual specificity of a work of art outside its historical context with intertextuality-inspired thinking about relations between images that generate unlikely, anachronistic associations across time and space. Such a fusion is possible due to a combination of perception and memory which I call “a remembering look”. The sphere of visual memory, which both acts on the object and is activated by its specific features, is a domain of the virtual. “Virtual” here designates “the power to act effectively and have influence without the intervention of matter”. The term has been long used in philosophy as a synonym for “potential”, as in waiting to be actualized. Henri Bergson associated virtuality with the immateriality of memory and its active role in the process of perception. In consequence, in the act of viewing we deal with a virtual, differential interaction between the perceived object and the memory-image it generates, regardless of the historical probability of such a dialogue. This interaction, actualizing a work from the past, produces new meanings in the present. I point to theoretical propositions (M. Bal, G. Didi-Huberman, M. A. Holly, W.J.T. Mitchell) supporting my position, which blur clear-cut distinctions between the object and the subject of the gaze, and distort the linear historical thinking disciplined by traditional historical explanations of art.
The second part of the paper is an analytical exemplification and meta-commentary of the above issues. It focuses on an analysis of a “virtual correspondence” between Edward Hopper’s Morning in the City (1944) and Johannes Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (1657), which visualizes the double meaning of “correspondence” as similarity and epistolary exchange. Main theoretical references will be J. Derrida’s critique of postal-principle from his book The Post-Card and M. Heidegger’s idea of Geschick – sending as history and destiny.