Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time

In this nonlinear study, Nagel (The Controversy of Renaissance Art), a professor at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, unravels the common threads running from the pre-Enlightenment era before the "conception of the fine art," through the 20th century, and details thrilling relationships between works as disparate as Michelangelo's Medici Chapel and Dan Flavin's fluorescent lights. Broadening "medieval" and "modern" to include Renaissance, baroque, and postmodern art, he recontextualizes the modern resistance to the art museum, "optical naturalism," the easel picture, and notions of artistic individuality with the premodern world, where art was "overwhelmingly site-specific," operated in established "iconographic systems," and "responded directly to institutional and societal imperatives." The analysis illuminates both periods equally. For example, Duchamp's conversion of the art world into a "consecrating mechanism" for his ready-mades is discussed in relation to relics and iconoclasm. Kurt Schwitters's three-dimensional collage and installation art catalyst, Cathedral of Erotic Suffering/Merzbau, is shown to be "a private dwelling that is a shrine space and an exhibition space." As Nagel persuasively argues, medievalism is "now encoded (usually unrecognized) in the DNA of contemporary art." Both erudite and imaginative, Nagel's study challenges conventional wisdom and erects new frames of reference for understanding critical developments in art history. 134 illus. (Dec.)