Article
Polish
ID: <
10670/1.rp1zdq>
Abstract
This article tackles the role of titles in abstract art and their status as verbal artefacts that have their own referential, intertextual and sonic meaning. Focusing on series of paintings by the American artist Frank Stella, Rejniak-Majewska examines their changing reception and the reasons why early Formalist interpretations of the paintings completely ignored their titles. As much as a critical perspective reveals Formalism’s factual, historical situatedness behind its universalist assumptions, the demand to recognize the active role of titles is not an attempt to identify an intention behind the work, but it encourages us to treat titles as a gesture, to acknowledge their poetics and the specificity of the references they construct.