Fluttered, from Crazy Quilt SeriesAnn StoddardU.S.A., b. 1953The life's work to date of Ann Stoddard demonstrates an impressive evolution. Up until very recently, she was a full-fledged participant in the late- dismantlement esthetic of deconstructive Post-Modernism: the final phase of the complete breakdown or stripping-away of the several fine-art disciplines in our culture. This analytic impoverishment was logical, purposeful, useful, valuable, and justified. It relieved the arts of the restrictive, proscriptive and prescriptive esthetics which had limited them since the early Renaissance, or for that matter, since the petroglyphs and cave paintings of the Stone Age. Artists are now, for the first time in world history, free to explore all the possibilities of art, unburdened by the formulaic requirements heretofore always imposed upon them by the expectations of their culture's patronage. The systematic impoverishment of the late-dismantlement esthetic gave us, for example, the noise-music of composer John Cage. It has given us, in poetry, the journalistic, shredded prose of contemporary verse. And in the visual arts, its logical conclusion was found in the genres which collectively have given us an era of art which goes "beyond painting and sculpture," and into the so-called "dematerialization of art" movements. These are, principally: Conceptual, Performance, Environmental, and Installation Art. Conceptual Art holds that the idea of a work of art is central, and need not be tied to its execution, which is therefore eschewed. The latter three movementsPerformance, Environmental, and Installation Artare united by the theoretical premise that works of art have no permanent value or meaningfulness. They stress the transitory, the temporary, the immediate, as opposed to the long-term universality of works of art. Works of these genres are assembled for a limited period of time, then dismantled and discarded forever, thereafter existing only in terms of record-keeping, of photographic and written documentation. Their built-in obsolescence, their hasty or eventual destruction, is a fundamental condition of their creation. They are diametrically opposed in theory to the idea of artistic permanence and universality. |
![]() Fluttered, from Crazy Quilt Series Oil, acrylic, graphite on stiffened canvas 63.25"w x 36"h Ann Stoddard ![]() A Readjustment, from Crazy Quilt Series Oil, acrylic, graphite on stiffened canvas 69.75"w x 49"h Ann Stoddard | |
Stoddard's participation in and exemplification of the late-dismantlement esthetic is superbly illustrated by a complex and highly important collaborative work she executed in 1988 with artist Ralph Paquin. The work, called ...r-e-m-o-t-e..., was a major installation work and performance done while in residence at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Boston. The work was reported on as follows in the June 1988 issue of the magazine Art New England in an article called "The Gallery As Laboratory":
More recently, Stoddard has been gradually retreating from the extreme, constitutional impermanence of Installation and Performance Art. Her latest works are much closer to actual, free-standing paintings (with sculptural unevenness of surface) than her work has been in the past. Some of these graphite-and- acrylic works are on rough, low-relief fiberglass. Yet even those done on canvas, like her two paintings in this exhibition, are unstretched, hung like tapestries. Stoddard seems still uncomfortable with the utter flatness of easel canvas, as if it were a material still too suspect, under the late-dismantlement esthetic, to be surrendered to, or embraced anew by a revolutionary-minded artist of radically intended originality. Yet the unfettered tabula rasa of simple, primed-and-stretched, blank canvas seems, like an undertow, to be drawing her, as the blank page draws a poet, to fill it with figures, with metaphors, rather than to abdicate any longer to the pedestrian literalness, the unadulterated materiality of the late-dismantlement art of deconstructive Post-Modernism. A process in the weather of her art is evolving and advancing it, in full view of her audience. | ||
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April 8, 1997 | ||
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