Metonymy In Contemporary Art: A New Paradigm

In Metonymy in Contemporary Art, Denise Green develops an original approach to art criticism and modes of creativity inspired by aspects of Australian Aboriginal and Indian thought. Interweaving her own evolution as an artist with critiques of Clement Greenberg and Walter Benjamin as well as commentary on artists such as Joseph Beuys, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella, and others, Green explores the concept of metonymic thinking as developed by the poet and linguist A. K. Ramanujan and its relevance to contemporary painting and aesthetics. In Ramanujan's formulation of metonymic thinking, the human and natural worlds are intrinsically related to one another as are the transcendent and mundane. When applied to contemporary art, metonymic thinking implies that one must understand that the creativity of the artist flows from a fusion of an inner state of mind and the outer material world. Pointing out how this alternative aesthetic and cognitive mode is left wanting in art criticism, Green argues for a critical discourse and interpretive mode in contemporary art that is at once global and pluralist in perspective. Denise Green is an Australian American artist and writer in New York City. Since 1972 her work has been the subject of over eighty-five solo exhibitions. She has collaborated as an editor for Semiotext(e) and is a member of the Graduate Faculty at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Her writings have appeared in Arts Magazine, Art Press, Art Monthly Australia, and Art and Australia. Retrospectives of her work have appeared in major museums from the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center/Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, theLudwig Museum in Budapest, and the Saarland Museum in Saarbrucken, Germany. Examples of her work can be found at www.denisegreen.net.