Department of Fine Arts,
Okanagan University College
WORDS OF ART: THE B_LIST
WORDS OF ART: THE B_LIST
Compiled by Robert J.
Belton
If you would like to see something removed, added or corrected, please feel free to
contact
bbelton@klo1.ouc.bc.ca.
BACK TRANSLATION: See
translation.
BACKLASH: There are two related senses of
this word.
The first is applied to the often extremely aggressive resistance
of so-called right-wing traditionalists to the dismantling or
redefinition of the traditional
canon in the teaching of the humanities (see also
political correctness). The second is the title of a
popular book by
feminist journalist Susan Faludi, with the self-explanatory
subtitle
The Undeclared War Against American Women. Faludi's
backlash thesis is that the
media and
popular culture have conspired, even if unconsciously, to
return the relative social positions of the sexes to the status quo
of earlier times in spite of some minor advances for women. The
backlash thus appears nearly everywhere: principal examples include
news stories about women over thirty having poor chances of
marrying, the contemporary anti-abortion movement, and advertising-
inspired anorexia. The latter theme has become very important in
recent feminist
art. Examples include the large installations of Elizabeth
Mackenzie, Tanya Mars' performance Ms Frankenstein, and any
number of others.
BAKHTINIAN: Pertaining to the ideas of
Mikhail
Bakhtin. See
carnivalesque,
chronotope,
dialogism,
heteroglossia.
BALKANIZATION: Deriving from the
Balkan peninsula,
the breaking up of something apparently whole into smaller, usually
antagonistic units. The idea is invoked in discussions of
political correctness, as if the hypothetically uniform
study of the humanities will disintegrate into a war between
opposed critical communities. There are many other things that
appear to be homogeneous, although they manifestly are not:
art history, the
cultural left,
feminism,
Marxism and
psychoanalytical criticism are only a few.
BARBARISM: A mistake in the form of a word or
image
resulting from the violation of a standard custom. Barbarisms are
common in modern art -- Picasso's
Demoiselles d'Avignon is a noted example -- and in cases of
colonializing
primitivism the barbarism works in two directions. E.g.,
anatomical distortions
appropriated from African artifacts violate European
standards of
figural representation, while the
artists who do the appropriating are often indifferent to
the
significance of the
motif in the original
culture, thus violating its norms as well. Although the
word frequently describes the transference of a motif from a non-
European culture to a European one, it can go either way. James
Clifford's Predicament of Culture, for instance, describes
a tribal person using a beer cooler for ritual purposes. This may
be an instance of a barbarism serving as a
perruque.
BARING THE DEVICE: A literary term deriving from
Russian formalism, it is what must be done in works of
art to show that they are not accurate reflections of
reality, as in
verisimilitude, but objects unto themselves. Cf
autonomy,
autotelic,
defamiliarization,
deictic,
truth to materials.
BARTHESIAN: Pertaining to the ideas of the
very
influential French writer, critic and teacher Roland Barthes. See
denotation,
diegesis,
floating,
jouissance,
linguistics,
metonymic skid,
pleasure of the text,
semiotics,
signifiance,
text,
work,
writing degree zero.
BASE: See
base and superstructure, base materialism.
BASE AND
SUPERSTRUCTURE: In
Marxist terminology, the base is the economic structure of
a society which determines or conditions the state, culture and
social consciousness, called the superstructure.
BASE MATERIALISM: Georges
Bataille's rejection of the
idealism of Surrealism, among other things, took the form
of a
Dionysian lowering (bassesse) of the self into
the instinctual plane in which
appetitive drives determined most behaviour. The idea has
subsequently been embellished by Rosalind Krauss (L'Amour fou:
Photography and Surrealism) and others.
BASSESSE: A lowering of a
person, state of mind or thing
into the primal plane of base materialism. The idea has begun to
achieve currency in
descriptions of
Dionysian works which generate distaste for some viewers,
like those of Mark Prent or Jana Sterbak.
BATAILLEAN: Pertaining to the notions of
Georges
Bataille, once a nearly forgotten writer rejected by the orthodox
Surrealists, but very influential among the French
intellegentsia from the 1960s and in the United States from
the mid-1980s. See base materialism, bassesse,
general economy,
informe,
heterology, etc.
BATHOS: An anticlimax produced from an
overreaching
for grand style, especially when the subject is not normally so
treated. A particularly common sort in the modern period is the
faintly ridiculous treatment of historical personages as gods or
heroes (see
genres), as in Antonio Canova's Napoleon, Horatio
Greenough's Washington, and so on. Compare
hyperbole,
litotes,
meiosis.
BAUDRILLARDIAN: Pertaining to the
ideas of Jean
Baudrillard. See
simulacra,
simulation.
BEAUTY MYTH: Title of a controversial
book by Naomi
Wolf arguing that
patriarchal society oppresses women by producing images in
fashion, etc., that they cannot emulate without damaging or even
destroying themselves.
BEAUX-ARTS: See
high art (culture).
BEGGING THE QUESTION: A flaw or
fallacy in rational
argument in which one of the premises is founded on the
matter under dispute. E.g., Clive Bell's
unique aesthetic emotion is the result of
significant form, which is itself undefined except as
certain relations of forms that generate aesthetic emotion. The
argument is circular (see
tautology) and is thus
invalid. For a practical application, see
cultural selection.
BEHAVIOUR: Activity, or the combination of
observable
and describable responses of an agent to internal and external
stimuli. The term is included here because of its connotations in
behavioural science and the potentially rich implications the
latter has for the description and interpretation of the experience
of works of
art. See, e.g.,
ethology,
phenomenology.
BEHAVIOURISM: The school of
psychology, most famously
linked to the studies of B. F. Skinner, which argues that most
human behaviour is conditioned or learned, rather than genetic.
BEHAVIOUR OF ART: See
ethology.
BENJAMIN: See aura, negative theology.
BERKELEIAN IDEALISM: See
idealism.
BETRAYING VERSUS EXPRESSING EMOTION: In his
Principles of Art, R.G. Collingwood ascertained that the
simple, unreflective experience of an emotion, with its concomitant
distortion of the facial features, etc., was only a matter of
betraying emotion. Much more significant was the
expression of emotion, which involved a certain degree of
cognitive development and communication, as in
art. See
craft,
expression theory,
techne.
BIG LIE: Manipulation of the facts, particularly in
popular contexts, make a story more interesting. For example, some
writers think the to-do about
political correctness is nothing more than a recent big lie
produced within popular culture as part of a decades-old attack on
the so-called ivory tower. (See Michael Berubé's "Public Image
Limited," Village Voice [June 18, 1992]).
BINARY OPPOSITIONS: Specific
examples of
enantiomorphs -- i.e., symmetrically opposed pairs -- most
usually challenged in social
criticisms. Perhaps the most frequent
critique of binary oppositions is
feminism's attack on supposed
gender symmetry.
BIOGRAPHICAL FALLACY: According to
formalism and other types of
criticism that downplay the role of the
author of a work, the erroneous idea that a work's value
and meaning reside in the circumstances of the
artist's life. It is clear that a
psychoanalytical interpretation would also be so
understood.
BIOPHILIC: Pertaining to a love of the organic
or the
natural. Rosa Bonheur and Franz Marc both had strong inclinations
of this sort, although they gave them different
expressions.
BI-SEXISM: Although the word itself simply
means
discrimination based on gender,
sexism is most often understood as discrimination
specifically against women (see
feminism). That has led Warren Farrell, one of the
proponents of the
new masculinity, to coin the word "bi-sexism" to indicate
discrimination which works against both males and females. For
example, a man's attachment to the workplace, he writes in
The Myth of Male Power, is not a sign of his greater
privilege but of his obligation to perform, leading to greater
stress and a shorter life.
BISTRE: A brown wash made from soot, commonly used in the Renaissance.
BLACK HUMOUR: Absurdity, immorality and
morbidity
used for comic effect or to draw attention obliquely to some
regrettable state of affairs that is too painful to confront
directly. The Surrealists used it frequently, and André Breton even
published an anthology of it. Black humour raises questions about
the
autonomy of a work of
art. Cf
autotelic.
BODEGONES: Paintings combining
genre and still-life, often with a religious scene tucked
into the background. Aertsen and Veláquez painted notable
examples. See
mise-en-abîme.
BODY COLOUR: A rather opaque type of watercolour, sometimes used sparingly for emphasis and ornament and sometimes used for the entire image, at which point it is likely called a "gouache."
BOHEMIANISM: Deriving ultimately from
Gypsy wanderers
thought to have been from Bohemia, Czechoslovakia, Moravia, or
Romania, bohemianism evolved into the anti-bourgeois,
anti-intellectual (see
anti-intellectualism), alternative lifestyle of the
avant-garde creative community in the Romantic nineteenth
century. In the later twentieth century, there are successful
artists whose lifestyles are about as far from the
marginal as one can get, yet their carefully cultivated
cachet of Romantic
genius still capitalizes on the bohemian myth. See also
divine afflatus.
BOO-HOORAY THEORY: In
Language Truth, and
Logic, philosopher A. J. Ayer asserted that all moral or other
evaluations state nothing of objective value and are simply
expressions of belief, emotion, feeling, and the like (see
logical positivism for further explanation). Boo-hooray
theory is simply a nickname for this proposition.
BOURGEOIS: Originally related to burgher --
i.e., a
citizen of a burg -- and now generally taken to mean a typical
middle-class person with middle-class moral, economic and other
values. Bourgeois can be both an adjective and a noun; in the
latter case, strictly speaking, it means a male. When a female is
meant, bourgeoise is the term used. Bourgeoisie means the middle
class in general. Haute bourgeoisie means the upper middle class,
who might be better described as capitalists. Bourgeois, as might
be imagined, appears frequently in
Marxist writing.
BOURGEOIS DRAMA: A literary term roughly akin to
genre (sense 2). It has been used by Norman Bryson
(Tradition and Desire) in discussions of the more
theatrical paintings of Greuze (e.g., The Drunkard's Return).
BRACKETING: In E. G. A.
Husserl's
phenomenology, one can never know if the external world has
any existence independent of the perceiving subject. Accordingly,
one "puts on hold" (i.e., brackets) any speculations concerning the
external world, turning instead to a profound investigation of the
workings of one's own consciousness.
BRICOLAGE: French term meaning "puttering
around" or
"doing odd jobs." Claude Lévi-Strauss (see
structuralism) gave the term a more precise anthropological
sense in books like The Savage Mind (1966) by stipulating that it refer to,
among other things, a kind of shamanic spontaneous creativity (see
shaman) accompanied by a willingness to make do with
whatever is at hand, rather than fuss over technical expertise. The
ostensible purpose of this activity is to make sense of the world
in a non-scientific, non-abstract mode of knowledge by designing
analogies between the
social formation and the order of nature. As such, the term
embraces any number of things, from what was once called
anti-art to the punk movement's reinvention of utlitarian
objects as fashion vocabulary (see, for example, Dick Hebdige's
Subculture [1979]). See also bricoleur.
BRICOLEUR: French term meaning
"handy-man" or "jack-
of-all-trades," now implying someone who continually invents his or
her own strategies for comprehending reality. Marcel Broodthaers has been so described.
See bricolage.
BURDEN OF PROOF: A legal term
meaning that the holder
of any
intepretation diverging from what is objectively
describable (i.e., factual) carries the burden of proving that it
is plausible beyond a reasonable doubt. Some
art criticism -- especially
subjective impressionism, but by no means only that --
seems to have forgotten this basic principle of rational
argument.
BURLESQUE: The use of
caricature, distortion, exaggeration,
irony,
parody, and/or
travesty to ridicule a subject normally treated in a noble
or dignified manner. Many of Hogarth's prints could be so
described, as could some of the work of Vincent Trasov, General
Idea, Gilbert and George, and so on.
BUTTRESS: Any of a variety of structures designed to reinforce a wall, particularly in instances where the thrust of a vault tends to make the walls of a structure spread apart. There are, for example, massive buttresses supporting the giant dome of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. The most celebrated type is the so-called "flying buttress" developed for use in Gothic cathedrals: in these cases, the thrust of the vault is pulled away from the walls altogether via braces rather like the ribs of an umbrella without any fabric.
© Copyright 1996 Robert J.
Belton
Back to Words of
Art Index
Back to Fine Arts
Page
Back to OUC Arts and Education
Home Page
Back to OUC Home Page