I finished reading the book, A perfect mess, today. Honestly, I was closing on it about 4 days ago, when there were only about 10 pages to go. But, I kind of put the book off in an effort to, you know, organize some thoughts and ideas and facts in order, which turned out to be doing absolutely nothing! So, in an effort to try it for some more, I have extended the borrowing period today, giving me yet another one week to do absolutely nothing at all about the book. Remember, I already finished reading the book?

Here comes one of the tidiest version of the history of Western fine arts. It’s somewhat lengthy, but it’s not like we’re reading 100 pages-long theses on the Western art tradition. So, try it, and you will be surprised to figure out how one can succinctly put the entire history within a couple of paragraphs, around such irrelevant theme as the mess. So, here it goes:

The West was a bit slower to catch on. When the visual arts blossomed in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a widely embraced guiding principle was to hold up order, in its various forms, as an ideal. In balanced, standardized, uncluttered composition, in the heroic stances or graceful curves of subjects, and in virtuous and biblical themes, artists often strived to reveal order as a form of beauty and vice versa. There were certainly exceptions, especially among Dutch painters such as Vermeer and Rembrandt, who by the mid-seventeenth century were already experimenting with crowded, random-looking placements of figures and objects. But it was during the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century that artists began to pick in earnest at the ordered conventions of painting, by literally blurring images, employing thicker and even lurid brushstrokes, and dropping the Sunday-schoolish lessons in codes of behavior. There is little of the neat and orderly in Delacroix’s dreamlike depictions of lions tearing into horses.
Impressionism widened art’s rift from the orderly, often taking the stuff of everyday peasant life and visually refracting it into bursts of color. Van Gogh took this messy process so far that even today many experts tend to regard his genius as the flip side of his mental disintegration. But madness wasn’t a prerequisite for pushing art into the realm of the disordered. While romanticism and impressionism were assaults on the orderly, expressionism and cubism, which followed in the beginning of the twentieth century, demolished it. After centuries of trying to nudge reality in the direction of perfection, the task of the artist had become in part to mess reality up.
Indeed, one of the greatest challenges to contemporary artists has been to come up with novel, provocative ways of being messy. Dadaism got this endeavor off to a rollicking start around 1915 by self-consciously breaking away from the established order of art in all ways — even by pointedly refusing to be a clearly definable movement of art. That is, to the extent that it was about anything, Dadaism was a disorganized embracing of disorder. That’s not easy to top, mess-wise. But many have tried. The formless blotches of abstract expressionism, the bizarre pairing of images employed by surrealists like Rene Magritte and Salvador Dali, the riotous dribblings of Jasper Johns, the scrap collages of Robert Rauschenberg — all are at least in part attempts to employ some form of disorder, be it clutter, mixture, blur, noise, or convolution, among others. Today there are hundreds of established painters and sculptors who prominently incorporate elements of mess and disorder into their works. Among the messaphilic artists who have been the subject of major shows in recent years: Richard Tuttle, who wrangles bits of wire, plywood, rope, and other round objects into small, abstract works; Jon Kessler, who assembles video monitors, moving contraptions, and blotchy paintings into sprawling kinetic sculptures; Chris Jordan, who photographs industrial refuse such as sawdust piles, bales of recycled metal, and discarded cell phones; and Elizabeth Murray, who paints on a jumble of screwed-together minicanvases. (A perfect mess, pp. 294 — 296)