Part 1

               How does the canvas ‘hang’ today? 

1 Jean Malouel,  

Virgin and Child with Angels,

 (1410 circa)

Within the Renaissance period the merchant shipping industry was booming and it’s interactions with the East led to the discovery of canvas, used over there for sails. Mantegna and others popularised development within Venice. The word canvas originates from the Arabic translation of it’s materiality: cannabis or hemp. It became popular due to it’s light weight and portability, unlike frescoes and panels. Left shows what is believed to be the earliest recorded canvas in 1410. The canvas’ ‘job description’ was enviable personified, ‘just hang there as your two dimensional self and you’ll be transformed into an idealistic illusion of golden value, ‘hopefully’’. However within the 20^th Century the canvas’ job description began to evolve. It was no longer just what was painted on it that was important; it’s structure, context and surrounding spatial arena began to cry out to play their part. Rejection of categorising art in metanarratives, control by the state and academy aided a fusion between high and low culture and encouraged a new outlook. The canvas was no longer exclusive to ‘high’ history painting, portraiture or landscape. Suprematism and Impressionism dissolved the paint surface into more of a fragmented ephemeral reality. Cubism and abstraction fractured the idealism of the past into irregular, multiply-angled compositions taking on many dimensions. Developments in science and industrialisation meant, ‘Man [became]...less responsive to fixed motionless images’.1a

Duchamp’s momentous shift of seeing an ‘object’ as conceptual message shifted perception threefold also. This led to approaching the canvas as an object with conceptual value and message as a solid structure rather than just as a surface to create beauty on. Our post-structural, deconstructional (debated I know) age later contributed to a loss in value attributed to the singular ‘object’ in favour of plurality, decentralisation and a focus on the interplay of signs.

1 Jean Malouel (circa 1370-1415) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
 
1a Edited by Charles Harrison & Paul Wood, (2003), Art in Theory 1900-2000, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford OX4 1JF, 2003. 'Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) 'The White Manifesto'', pg. 654.