engleski

How Style Became Famous and Irrelevant at the Same Time

The article is concerned with the theoretical issue of the status of style in visual arts, aiming to demonstrate that – within art history – stylistics acquired its disciplinary autonomy in the late 18th century and almost simultaneously experienced its first crisis, particularly in regard to its application to the then contemporary art production. Specifically, J. J. Winckelmann was the first to detach stylistics from rhetoric, thus expanding the field of stylistic competence to the history of art and anchoring style within a temporal dimension to enable the stylistic analysis of historical periods in art. It was also the time when, under the influence of early Romanticism, the entirely opposite tendencies originated, those of the emphasized individuation of art. Therefore, parallel to the birth of theoretical notion of “the styles of epochs“, romanticists – resisting the laws pertaining to the idea of “the spirit of the time“ – not only paved the way for Modernism, but also disabled the application of a newly risen stylistic methodology concerned with the cultural codification of style, as it was conceived by Winckelmann. The newly arisen crisis, provoked by the diverse viewpoints advocated by “classicists“ and “romanticists“, eventually culminated in the schism of Paris Salon and the emergence of a wide range of new trends, heterogeneous conceptions and avant- gardes, altogether in a very small timeframe. The concept of “the style of epoch“ has been staggered by the challenges of the 20th century. The function of culture within the stylistic characteristics of the 19th century art production was appropriated by artists, whose artwork acquired the total objectual autonomy. As to the culturally codifying stylistic analysis of the historical periods which was conceived in the 18th century, it could no longer be applied to the heterogeneous art production risen during the epoch of Modernism. By affirming the obviousness of the visual, Modernism eluded all the semantic, functional, utilitarian, narrative and symbolic burdens of the earlier periods. The strengthened expressivity as an artwork’s feature at the level of its authentic obviousness came to the forefront. Artwork’s style – as objectual style – replaced the paradigm of historical style. Thus codification, one of the oldest stylistic qualificatives, begun loosing its credibility as soon as in the period of early Romanticism. By the time of the rise of Modernism it got almost entirely replaced by the formally classifying procedure. Unlike codification, classification was based on the clearly discernible, comparable and detachable expressive artwork’s features, within a group of the visually congenial objectual phenomena. Thus conceived conception of modern art, that was based on visual obviousness, was most appropriately supported by the theories of Formalism, which took into consideration both facture and authorial “writing“, that is, the visual appearance of material stageability without a semantic ballast. In this context, the article endeavours to demonstrate how, subsequent to the epoch of Modernism, style can be discussed exclusively at a level of the obviously expressed artwork’s features. Besides, codification which follows the principle of temporal „anchoring“ within a cultural context of the epoch of Modernism remains both risky and inefficient stylistic strategy.

historical style ; stylistic codification ; objectual style in Modernism ; stylistic classification ; stylistic appearance ; stylistic expressivity ; erasing the style borders

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