last post on canon
November 9, 2009
The canon came to be a body of work revealing the momentum of humanity, our capacity for excellence, not to be a limitation but as something to pass on to the future against which we test our mettle if we dare. Here in lies the arrogance of thinking we can rewrite the canon. It is written by powerful work and by artists returning to that work to reinvigorate their own, hence the reasoning that being ‘original’ also has something to do with being in touch with our origins not simply being novel or chasing the ever-shifting goal of the avant-garde. This is not to say the ‘new’ cannot be powerful but at some deep level there is a connection (or ‘dialogue’ to use Helen’s threshold word,) with the resourcefulness of the past.
The use of conventions does not condemn work to conformity. Conventions have been handed on because they are useful. The Mannerist period suffered critically from the view that it is essentially an affectation of style. But this is the view of non-practitioners, to the practising figurative artist it is seen as a period when the artists had free use of the conventions developed by their forebears. Draughtsmen and painters assimilated anatomical structure assembling their own mental schema (somewhat elongated in the work of Parmagianino, Pontormo and El Greco) on which to base and manipulate their construction. Rather than an affectation of style which suggests atrophy, it is a period of the growth, where artists’ mastery of construction skills enabled them to play intuitively and therefore inventively.
