클레멘트 그린버그의 '역사적 형식주의'에 관한 연구

Abstract

Clement Greenberg was one of the most influential critics, philosophers of modern art. His theory on modern art is called 'Modernism'. The Modernism, I think, consist of the two elements; one is formalism, the other is a historical perspective. The purpose of this thesis disclose a meaning in Greenberg's theory of art, in the light of the two elements. I borrowed the term 'historical formalism' from Eyesight Alone, a book on Greenberg's theory by Caroline A. Jones, and took my main title in this paper. The term is, I think, adequate to my task. Greenberg's concept of form seems to be analogous to that of Clive Bell, "significant form". Bell said that "'significant form' is the one quality common to all works of visual art". And it "stir our aesthetic emotion." For Greenberg, however, quality of a work of art inheres in its 'content'. Quality is, therefore, 'content'. And quality is aesthetic value. This quality, also, originates in inspiration, vision, 'content,' not in 'form.' And this is experienced by our own intuition. In Greenberg' words, the artistic quality of work of art lies in the problem of taste, based on, most of all, Immanuel Kant. From this point of view on form, as well as taste, art should be independent of history. But the art in Greenberg's perspective has its history. This is the characteristic point in Greenberg's modernism. According to Greenberg, Modernism is "the intensification, almost the exacerbation," of the self-critical tendency "that began with the philosopher Kant." And Greenberg conceives of "Kant as the first real Modernist", for he was "the first to criticize the means itself of criticism". Just as in his Critique of Pure Reason Kant attempted to make clear what one could see, through self-criticism of reason, Greenberg does what art is, through self-criticism of art. The task of self-criticism in art was to "eliminate from the specific effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art." For Greenberg, the history of art in painting is "that of a progressive surrender to the resistance of its medium; which resistance consists chiefly in the flat picture plane's denial of efforts to 'hole through' it for realistic perspectival space." And this history, as Greenberg believed, has developed autonomously.