Decretation and Undoing: George Bellows's Excavation Paintings, 1907-1909
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[1] Courtauld Institute of Art
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- Localización: Art history: journal of the Association of Art Historians, ISSN 0141-6790, Vol. 40, Nº. 4, 2017, págs. 838-855
- Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
This essay is interested in the role that destruction ans undoing play in the work of the American Ashcan painter George Bellows, and in the relation of these things to the perception of memory and past. It charts the vivid love affair with destruction in a series of four paintings Bellows made between 1907 and 1909. The excavations for a new Pennsylvania Station building in mid-town Manhattan fascinated and horrified New Yorkers, and Bellows responded to the compelling spectacle it provided with what has been called the first 'great drama' of his carrer. In the excavation series and particularly in "Excavation at Night" (1908, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art), Bellows offers us an image of destruction as a fantasy of remarking the vanished past. 'Decreation' in the sense the term is used by Giorgio Agamben in "Potentialities" (1999), and the Freudian concept of 'undoing', provide a way into these meanings. The argument is that the series amounts to a nuanced interrogation of the impulses and implications of the 'rage' to undo both memory and the past.
