The Animal Within: Explaining the Bizarre and Ludicrous in Modern Art - Hardcover

Inhaltsangabe

Pollock was well aware that intelligence will always try to influence the result in order to push the act of painting towards something recognisable. Intelligence wants this control because it is less disturbing than allowing a deeper unidentified sense of form to emerge in the act of painting. Pollock took great pains to stop his intelligent mind from influencing the result. In an interview for Life magazine he said, `I don't let the image carry the painting... if it creeps in, I try to do away with it... to let the painting come through. `This is a very reveling phrase. It implies Pollock is working to stop his intelligence dominating the act of painting.

Modern art is a hot topic. Everyone has an opinion about Damien Hirst's shark in formaldehyde, or Tracey Emin's unmade bed. In The Animal within Christopher Hollins unpicks the reasons why art has taken such an apparently bizarre and controversial turn in recent years. In laying out his startling new theory of Modern art the shows how human intellect has marginalised the animal instinct in all art forms. This is the `animal within', which has been pushed to the back of the modern mind, and artists are particularly attuned to respond to it.

Condemning modern trends in art as mere worthless attention-seeking is too superficial a response. Hollins shows how the roots of these apparently new ideas in fact stretch back into human pre-history.

The very process of evolution has hard-wired us to make these kinds of images in an attempt to free the mind from our overbearing intellectualisn. Our fascination with the shock of the new stems directly from our genetic heritage.

The Animal within explains Modern Art as an attempt to look beyond our intelligence to rediscover an `animal' sensaton of objects and events we still possess in the the oldest, deepest parts of our mind.

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