Concepts of Modern Art ed. by Tony Richardson and Nikos Stangos (review)

Books 349 Gregory Bateson attempts to formulate a hypothesis linking culture and nonverbal communication. He is perhaps at his best when he pokes sly fun at those who resort to a sexual interpretation of almost everything. Nancy Munn deals with nonverbal communication concepts embodied in iconography. Her use of computer terms to describe aesthetic phenomena is, in my opinion, the only negative aspect of an otherwise interesting anthropological presentation. Many are shocked to find the language and concepts of a new discipline imposed on an older one. For example, Munn states that ‘this theory is stored and communicated in direct, immediately perceivable form by a visual model’. This kind of terminology , which irritates me, is avoided by Forge who deals with a similar subject in Sepik culture. In the last paper, W. T. Jones speaks as the outsider who listened and puzzled over what was said at the Symposium. Admittedly, he is not an expert on art but he lets it be known that at the very least he is familiar with Cellini and Titian, has some knowledge of literature, mathematical models, logic, psychology and politics, which permits him to exercise a critical overview of the entire meeting. He states that ‘the various participants came to map the same factual information in different ways’. The word ‘factual’ is the trap; the participants by no means dealt with the same facts. As one who is knowledgeable in many of the sameareas as Jones, including anthropology and primitive art, I would have been happier had this last paper been omitted altogether. Despite the poor quality of the illustrations and the inclusion of an incongruous paper on contemporary American Indian artists, the book is a welcome addition to the literature of anthropology and art history. Movements in Modern Art. Donald Carroll and Edward Lucie-Smith. Horizon Press, New York, 1973. 208 pp., illus. $6.95. Reviewed by John Miher* This transcription of conversations about modern art between Donald Carroll and the art critic Edward LucieSmith highlights a moment in the history of art criticism. For we see the critic in the midst of his time: his preconceptions and predilections are those of a particular moment that itself will find a place within the history of art. Despite the publishers’ claim that the book ‘is written to meet the needs of the lay reader who has wanted a clearly written concise guide to the world of modern art’, what the more informed reader is most likely to value is less what it tells of modern art, than what it tells of the poPition of the art critic in 1973 in the Western world. The construction of the book from cassette tape recordings encourages a casual, conversational approach to the subject, although Lucie-Smith is sufficiently a master of language to phrase occasionally outstanding original comments . The conversational basis, adopted in an attempt to make the material more digestable to the general reader, is so artificially construed as to ensure that the text is closer to journalism than to real conversation; there is little interplay and certainly no friction between its participants. Farroll acts as an efficient interviewer but one unwilling to discomfort his subject, acting, in preference , as a mirror to reflect or enlarge upon his subject’s ideas. The book attempts to be comprehensive in its scope despite its small physical scale and comprises a chain of considered, adjusted and experienced reflections upon the nature of 20th-century culture seen through the media of the visual arts. The critic, operating in the hinterland between art history and art criticism, sees his role as the interpretation of the cultural images of the recent past and, as nearly as possible, the present. Comparatively little attention is paid to the historical context from which a work has emerged or, indeed, its physical properties of scale, structure or handling. Little is made of artists’ own opinions or hypotheses or insights provided by contemporary texts. All this is assumed to have been digested. Movements in Modern Art is in sharp contrast to recent compendia of texts and facts in which the art historian or critic acts as a sifter and editor of information rather than a commentator upon...