抽象艺术的文化政治——形式主义与社会艺术史的论争

Cultural politics of abstract art:disputes between formalism and social art history

抽象艺术已经发展了将近一个半世纪,但由于最初形式主义占据了批评的主流,而后又多政治意识形态的关切,艺术史一直缺乏合适的契机更好地思考其特征、价值和产生的原因。形式主义批评方法继承了德国传统对艺术自身的形式特征进行分析的特点,并从巴尔到格林伯格建立起一个合理化的现代主义批评范式;也造成了许多对抽象艺术的刻板印象。社会历史方法弥补了形式主义的不足,尤其是夏皮罗对巴尔、格林伯格的纠正,揭示了使抽象艺术具有价值的那种艺术观念并非永恒,而是现代特定的社会历史的产物,"为艺术而艺术"和"纯审美"等现代艺术观念具有其时代的阶级根源,抽象艺术乃至现代艺术的价值不是在于纯形式,而是在于它承载了现代特有的价值。这些论争打破了形式主义批评的霸权,对于中国当下对抽象艺术的理解、实践和讨论都具有重要的启示。

In spite of the 100-year-old history of abstract art,there has been no in-depth reflection on its characteristics,value and the historical context of its emergence.The reasons lie in the prevalence of formalism in its early stage and the political concerns later.The formalism criticism,though establishing a modernism criticism paradigm,created stereotypes about abstract art.Approaches of social history repaired the defects of formalism,esp when Shapiro corrected Bal and Greenberg.It argued that what makes abstract art valuable is not eternal but simply aproduct of a given social and historical situation and that the value of abstract art as well as modern art lies not in pure form but in the modern value it bears.These arguments,having broken the hegemony of formalism criticism,also shed light on our understanding of abstract art in China.