Art, Art, Art

I really enjoyed Friday's class in which we discussed each of the pieces/clips we had chosen on our postwar culture Easter egg hunt. If any of you are interested, here is the link to Serge Poliakoff's wikipedia page and here are several of his pieces.

In particular, this one caught my eye:

(source)
Poliakoff, born in 1900 in Moscow, moved to France and in 1962 became a French Citizen. Previously he traveled through Istanbul and Germany, playing guitar and balalaika. He also was in contact with Kandinsky, which perhaps would explain why his art seems to have more structure to it than that of Abstract Expressionists. Kandinsky, who died before the end of WWII, had been a member of Der Blaue Reither (The Blue Rider) which we studied in Civ. (It also included Franz Marc if that jogs anyone's memory).

But, to get back to Poliakoff. I was looking at a few more of his pieces when I saw the one above and immediately thought of the France. Could this be Poliakoff's representation of the flag? I immediately found a picture of the flag, realized that white is on the left of red, and deflated a bit inside. Why was I so eager to impart meaning on this work? Why can't I look at it and be simply absorbed in it the same way that I can with a Rothko (who while not a self-defined expressionist, was a colorfield painter, put under the umbrella of Abstract Expressionism).

I think it's hard for me to accept that a piece of art can simply not mean or represent anything, which is more than a bit odd, considering I really love Dadaism. Looking at other pieces by Poliakoff, I see faces and cliffs and falling rocks, and I'm aware that I'm not experiencing the pieces in the way they were meant to be viewed, understood, and valued.

It's this attachment to meaning and representation which Abstract Expressionism sought to unseat, and thought perhaps they were successful at the time, introducing an attitude which did not scrutinize a piece for the sake of decoding it, it's clear that now the attitude has disappeared, in me at least. This saddens me a bit, but examining art, it's clear that one style period is often the response to a preceding one. But this leaves me wondering what style period we're in right now. What is it responding to? More importantly, why?