Cracked traces: Re-reading the history of Western art

Author: Geng Youzhuang
Publisher:
Publication Date: 2005-06-01
Features: No matter how brief, the painter depicts the very moment of the action itself without seeing anything. What they depict can only be the memory of what they had previously seen. Thus, a self-portrait is essentially a ruin, a fragment of the painter's memory traces. Therefore, "ruins are not accidental; they are like the unexpected damage of a monument that was perfectly intact yesterday. From the beginning, there were ruins.The image seen is already a ruin." The experience of ruins challenges the concepts of totality, unity, identity, self-evidence, appropriateness, certainty, and adequacy, shattering all forms of origin, authenticity, ontology, and transcendence. Thus, we can only seek the traces of fragmentation in the ruins.—Geng Youzhuang
This book is a work that reinterprets the history of Western art through modern critical theory and interdisciplinary methods. It covers various important periods in the development of Western art, as well as numerous artists and artworks, but does not intend to outline a complete history of art. On the contrary, the discussions in this book demonstrate that, from any perspective, such an art history seems no longer to exist. As meaning itself continuously dissolves and reconstructs, the artist, the artwork, and the era they belong to can only manifest as fragmented traces. However, it is precisely in this scattered pursuit that the meaning of art history itself may be reconstructed.