Culture Clash: Aristotle and Visual Modernism and Postmodernism Kathleen Telfer
My indoctrination into the world of contemporary art started early. I attended a
performing arts preschool and from a young age I was taught that everything is equally art. My macaroni pieces hold places of honor in my family’s art collection; hour long dance performances choreographed at the age of three were to be viewed with utmost seriousness; I knew the meaning of the word pirouette before I could write my name with all the letters facing the proper direction. Art needs no description, qualification or justification other than the intention of creation. If you stand on your head with the intention to create art, you succeed. Standing on your head to win a bet – not art. I recognize that I am a product of the post‐Duchamp artistic worldview, where narrative and realistic renderings, the images upon which Aristotle focused his theory of art as mimesis, are less accepted by the art‐viewing public. The movements toward art in found objects and those that distance themselves from distinctive form and representational work make Aristotle’s theories on art no longer applicable, especially to visual art. Marcel Duchamp’s controversial 1917 readymade Fountain with its extreme self‐literalness, a urinal only distinguished from other urinals by the signature “R. Mutt,” rejects Aristotelian theory; later artists, particularly Mark Rothko, abandon mimetic theory all together.
Aristotle’s theory of art as mimesis relies, as the name suggests, on the idea that art
is mimetic, roughly translating to imitative or representative. Aristotle penned Poetics, in which this theory appears, as a rebuttal to Plato’s critiques of art as dangerous and
47
First-Year Writing 2010