The World in an Eye, First Draft #12a: Aboutness and/or Recognition, and Structure--Danto:

In my immediately preceding posts I presented David Summers’s account of the spatial arts, and adopted it with qualifications for my own account of the visual arts. One virtue of Summers’s account, so I argued, is that it treats (in my terminology, not Summers’s) artistic status and artistic meaning as internally connected. Any instance of the spatial arts, conceptualized as a real metaphor, admits of an indefinite range of elaborations whereby its conditions and characteristics—its spatial and temporal environment, its placement, its material features, and further figurative and decorative markings –-can be recruited into its artistic meaningfulness. This leaves us with the further tasks of exploring the great contours of such elaborations in human artistic life, in general aspects of meaningfulness such as ornamentation, representation, and expression, as well as the great types of visual arts, the artforms of bodily ornamentation (especially tattooing), masking, drawing, painting, and sculpture. Prior to undertaking those further tasks, I’d like for a final time to consider the question of artistic status, and indicate again how insuperable quandaries arise for accounts that treat the question of artistic status and the question of artistic meaning as conceptually separate and admitting of independent treatment. An additional point, and indeed the one that motivated me to consider Danto’s account encore une fois, is to consider an alternate way of understanding the most basic kind of internal complexity within visual artworks: whereas Michael Podro suggests recognition + (means and mechanisms of) sustaining recognition, and Summers conceptualizes it as real metaphor + elaboration, Danto fundamentally conceives of the complexity as ‘aboutness’ + embodiment (of aboutness). So I turn again to the most elaborated and intellectually sophisticated of the accounts that separate artistic status from artistic meaning, that offered by Arthur Danto in the past half-century, and try to give a full account of his views and the aporias that arise. 

     I’ll begin in an unusual though straight-forward manner by sketching Danto’s most general conceptions of philosophy and its proper method, and of his philosophical anthropology under his austere conception of philosophy. Around 1990 I heard Danto give a three-hour seminar as part of the summer art writing program at the San Francisco Art Institute (towards the end of its glory days, and prior to its terrible decline into inter alia the only art school in the world actively promoting animal abuse in art and harassing and slandering those who criticized it). At that time Danto was known to me as the author of the fundamental contribution to the philosophy of contemporary art, his book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, as well as his several years of writing art criticism for the magazine The Nation, and a puzzling lecture-essay wherein he proclaimed ‘the end of art’ (though for reasons very different from the superficially related claim made by Hegel in the 1820’s that art as a serious activity had come to an end).  My memory of that afternoon thirty-five years ago is not detailed, and as I recall Danto talked pretty much continuously in rehearsing his not-yet familiar (to me) talking points about Andy Warhol and his own initial conceptualization of the ‘art world’. One point struck me and has lived on in memory: in passing Danto said something like ‘of course philosophy is the activity giving the necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of concepts’. If for no other reason, I was struck because I had thought that in Anglo-American academic philosophy such a conception had been consigned to the dustbin of history by the example and prestige of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

     What, then, are for Danto the necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of the concept of art to an artifact?

Seventeen years after his initial encounter with Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box, and first in Transfiguration of the Commonplace, and then repeatedly for the few decades, Danto asserts that there are two necessary conditions for something being a work of art: (i) that it possess ‘aboutness’, i.e. being about something (Danto will also say that ‘being about something’ and ‘having a meaning’ are synonymous (see, among many instances, his late statement at Danto (2013a), p. 46); and (ii) that it ‘embody’ its aboutness. Danto initially derives these conditions from the famous thought experiment of multiple red squares of cloth: one is asked to imagine a number of identical, visually indiscernible red swathes, some of which are artworks (e.g. an all-red painting called ‘Kierkegaard’s Mood’, a minimalist work called ‘Red Square’, and a Conceptual piece called ‘Untitled’), and one of which isn’t (a piece of canvas painted red). Artworks possess aboutness, a mere piece of red canvas, which is just a material thing, doesn’t. Plainly both the concept of aboutness and the idea of embodying aboutness cry out for explication. How does Danto do these?

     Part of the inspiration for this particular and peculiar thought experiment lies proximally in G. E. M. Anscombe’s book Intention, and more distantly in some remarks in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, both of which raise the question of the difference between my arm going up (say, pulled up, or raised as a reflex reaction) and me raising my arm, on the assumption that the two events are perceptually indiscernible. Anscombe would say that the latter, but not the former, is intentional; others, such as Alasdair MacIntyre, will stress that the latter admits of causal explanation, and the former explanations in terms of reasons. Danto had addressed the issue in one of his earliest publications in terms of the idea that the latter is a ‘basic action’, and that anything that is caused by a basic action is (unsurprisingly) a non-basic action. Danto is clear that non-basic actions admit of causal explanation (almost by definition), but never (unlike Anscombe or MacIntyre) provides a sustained account of basic actions in terms of intention or as something made intelligible by reasons. Danto comes to think that action is not an explanatorily primitive item, but rather itself can be analyzed in terms of the more basic concepts of representation, explanation, and truth (Danto (1979), p. 479). In particular, any action has two components:  “a representation and a bodily movement; and the relationships are given through the fact that the representation causes the bodily movement, and the bodily movement satisfies the representation” (p. 484). In his mature conception, all action admits of causal explanation, and a basic action is only distinctive among actions in that it is basic when ‘directly’ caused by a representation (pp. 484-85). In his fullest statement of his general philosophy, Connections to the World, he presents an austere conception of philosophy and its proper method appropriate to his mature conception of action and representation: “philosophy is just the effort to understand the relationships between subjects, representations, and reality. Of course this means that the picture philosophy present of selves, representations, and reality will be exceedingly thin and abstract, for in truth the philosopher is to be concerned with these components only insofar as they impinge on one another in terms of the essential philosophical relationships” (Danto (1997), p. 40). With Danto adhering to this basic framework, one readily sees why, upon seeing Andy Warhol’s ‘Brillo Boxes’, he would have been struck with the thought that Warhol has raised the question of what makes the artwork an artwork, and why the (allegedly) visibly indiscernible box in the supermarket not one; further, one sees that on Danto’s austere conception, it must be that the former but not the latter possesses a semantic relation of ‘aboutness’ (or, more generally, ‘representation’): there is nothing it could have under such a parsimonious ontology.

     So, further, how do artworks ‘embody’ aboutness? In the final chapter of Transfiguration Danto seemingly offers a straightforward account of embodiment of aboutness. Roughly reconstructed, his main line of argument goes like this: There are three major aspects of embodiment in the relevant sense: rhetoric, style, and expression, and Danto conjectures that “the concept of expression is the most pertinent to the concept of art” (Danto (1981), p. 165). The characteristic effect of rhetoric is “to cause the audience of a discourse to take a certain attitude toward the subject of that discourse: to be caused to see that subject in a certain light” (ibid); style is “an overall quality” (p. 189, quoting Meyer Schapiro) which is ascribed to how the subject is presented and which conveys something of the character of that which makes that quality, i.e. the artist and her character (p. 197); expression oddly is given almost no explicit discussion, but Danto seems to indicate his agreement with Nelson Goodman’s characterization of expression as ‘metaphorical exemplification’ (p. 189), according to which x metaphorically exemplifies y indicates, for example, that to say ‘this landscape painting expresses sadness’ is analyzable as ‘this landscape painting denotes/refers to such-and-such landscape, it exemplifies the work of the Barbizon school, and it metaphorically exemplifies a particular quality or character of sadness via such reference. Danto devotes much of the chapter not to those three aspects of embodiment, but rather to metaphor, which he treats as the most basic and pervasive aspect of embodiment, and one that seems to underly the other characteristics. The key features of metaphor is that it is something made (p. 175), that it provokes its recipients to participation in meaning-making (p. 171), and that the meaning of a metaphor cannot be fully paraphrased, and so no other figuration can substitute for a metaphor without changing the meaning of the utterance (p. 179). Danto seems (to me) to discuss metaphor here in a variety of ways, and I have never been able to work out a reasonably consistent reconstruction of his views on this topic, but his central points seem to be that all artworks embody metaphors, that understanding an artwork is grasping the metaphor that it embodies, and that in the greatest instances the artwork itself becomes a metaphor of the viewer. My lack of full confidence in Danto’s account is perhaps endorsed by Danto himself, as in later writings he seems to acknowledge that he can give no satisfactory general or philosophical account of embodiment, and that to see what he means by the term one should just read his art criticism and treat his analyses as showing, if not saying, what embodiment is (see, for example, Danto (2013a), p. 46).

     If my reconstruction, or something close to it, of Danto’s characterization of art as something (an artifact?) possessing aboutness and embodying its aboutness is right, then one reasonable response would be to state that Danto’s account fails and/or is incomplete on its own terms, as he has not been able to state in a clear and coherent manner the necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of the concept of art to an object. It seems to me that in the last phase of his work, starting around the year 2000, Danto himself came to recognize this through consideration of the work of the commercial designer James Harvey (mistakenly referred to as ‘Steve Harvey’ in Danto’s first discussion of him), who had designed the original Brillo Box carton that Warhol had appropriated for his Brillo Box.

Danto noted that Harvey’s original cartons also ‘expressed’ their meanings: the original boxes are “a visual celebration of Brillo” wherein “meaning and embodiment are connected” (Danto (2000), p. xxv). If so, this immediately suggests the need for a third mark of the concept of art so as to distinguish categorically Warhol’s artistic boxes from Harvey’s artisanal-commercial ones. In his late book What Art Is Danto acknowledges that Harvey’s box “is art, but it is commercial art”. He distinguishes Harvey’s and Warhol’s work by saying “Harvey’s box belongs to visual culture, as that is understood, but Andy’s boxes belong to high culture” (Danto (2013b), p. 44) So Danto seemingly defuses the prima facie objection to his definition of art that Harvey’s work presents by classifying it as art, albeit of a commercial kind. But Danto is plainly uneasy with this (pseudo-?) solution, and says that “I have decided to enrich my earlier definition of art—embodied meaning—with another condition that captures the skill of the artist . . . I will define art as “wakeful dreams”” (p. 48). The point of adding this third condition is to emphasis that (a) just as there is (allegedly) no internal mark of the distinction between dream-experience  and waking experience, there is no visually discernible mark of the distinction between artworks and other artifacts; and (b) ‘wakeful’ dreams, unlike the usual private dreams, are shareable and made to be perceived by others. I am sorry to say that I cannot see how this proposed third condition adds anything to Danto’s earlier discussions (both (a) and (b) are explicitly noted in Transfiguration), nor a fortiori can I see how it throws any light on the distinction between Harvey’s commercial manner of embodying meanings and Warhol’s high-art manner.

     This post on Danto is mostly a digression, the explicit point of which is to suggest that Danto’s austere manner of philosophizing, as if ignorant of human history and philosophical anthropology, is utterly unpromising as the basis of a serious contemporary philosophy of art. The implicit point is again to motivate my own attempt to build an account of artistic meaning in the visual arts upon a basis that starts from basic features of human embodiment, perception, and language, and one that also treats as basic the dictum that ‘all art is historical’. In my following post I’ll return to the main line of my account with an exploration of the basic internal complexity of artworks through a consideration of some works by the Gestalt psychologist Rudolf Arnheim and the philosopher of perception John B. Brown.

References and Works Consulted:

G. E. M Anscombe, Intention (1959)

Rudolf Arnheim, Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order (1971)

--The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts (1982)

John H. Brown, ‘Seeing Things in Pictures’, in Philosophical Perspectives on Depiction (2010), ed. Abell and Bantinaki

Arthur Danto, ‘Basic Actions’, in American Philosophical Quarterly (1965)

--‘Action, Knowledge, and Representation’, and ‘Basic Actions and Basic Concepts’, in The Body/Body Problem (1999)

--The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981)

--Connections to the World: The Basic Concepts of Philosophy (1997)

--‘Art and Meaning’, in The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World (2000)

--‘My Life as a Philosopher’, in The Philosophy of Arthur C. Danto (2013a), ed. Auxier and Hahn

--What Art Is, (2013b)

Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (1968)

Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘The Antecedents of Action’, in Against the Self-Images of the Age (1971)

Michael Podro, Depiction (1998)

Meyer Schapiro, ‘Style’, in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society (1994)

David Summers, Real Spaces (2003)

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953)

The World in an Eye, First Draft, Part 11c: The sources of David Summers’s Real Spaces

In my previous post of the first draft of my book in the philosophy of artistic meaning in the visual arts, I summarized the art historian David Summers’s conception of spatial arts, and signaled my adoption of a slightly revised version of his account for my own conception of the visual arts as bearers of artistic meaning. Here I’d like to consider his route towards the idea of the spatial arts, and then consider his reasons for rejecting as basic the idea of the visual arts in favor of the spatial. The consideration of his route of inquiry will introduce valuable conceptual resources for my own account, and I’ll try to defuse his objections to the idea of visual arts. We can summarily state his central points with an eye towards their origins as follows: negatively, Summers argues that existing art historical conceptions are (i) formalist and (ii) unduly oriented towards psychology and perception; positively, (a) he adopts E. H. Gombrich’s suggestion for conceiving of the basis of the arts as props characterized by their function (as opposed to, say, visual images characterized by their referents or what they resemble); and (b) he adopts and develops Meyer’s Schapiro’s suggestions about the historical character of non-mimetic aspects (especially format, framing, and size) of artworks as not mere conditions, but rather as enabling and (potentially) elements of artworks and their meanings. I begin with the positive claims:

1. Summer’s route to spatial arts: As noted in my previous post, Summers has stated that his dissatisfaction with the extant mainstream of art historical concepts began with a trip to Tenochtitlan with George Kubler’s graduate seminar, and then later with his own attempts to teach pre-Columbian art. In developing his positive account of spatial artworks as ‘real metaphors’, his most basic and extensive debt is to E. H. Gombrich’s essay ‘Meditations on a Hobby-Horse’. Gombrich there presented a short series of considerations aiming to induce the reconceptualization of an ‘image’, away from something that is primarily visual and gains its identity by virtue of its representational aspect, to something that is primarily physical or material and that gains its identity by virtue of the function it fulfills. Gombrich starts from “a very ordinary hobby horse”, something that “is usually content with its place in the corner of the nursery and has no aesthetic ambitions”, characterized only by "its broomstick body and its crudely carved head which just marks the upper end and serves as holder for the reins” (Gombrich (1963), p. 1).

What makes it a ‘horse’? It neither imitates the appearance of a horse, nor is the toy something ‘abstracted’ from the appearance of a horse, and the “hobby horse does not portray our idea of a horse” (p. 3). Rather the hobby horse substitutes for a horse, and it can do this because it is at least “an imitation of certain privileged or relevant aspects” of a horse (p.60, in that it is rideable, and riding a horse matters (p. 7), it can “fulfill certain demands of the organism” (p.4). In a different context, the same stick could substitute for something else (e.g. a sword). Two questions immediately arise: if images rightly conceived are biologically-based substitutes, how do images so conceived relate to the traditional conception of images as the products of imagination or memory, and that represent some referent? And how does this conception relate to the naturalistic strain of visual art, especially in light of Gombrich’s own account of the development of the naturalistic (Gombrich called it ‘illusionist’) art of the West in his canonical Art and Illusion (written shortly after the essay on the hobby horse)?

     Gombrich’s answers to the two questions are at most quite brief, and indeed the answer to the first is limited to what must be called a mere hint. With regard to the first, he suggests a conceptual ‘speculation’, where the owner and user of the undecorated stick ‘ridden’ as a horse “in a playful or magic mood—and who could always distinguish the two?—” fixes ‘real’ reins and is “even tempted to ‘give it two eyes near the top end. Some grass could have passed for a mane. Thus our inventor ‘had a horse’.” (p. 4) So the hobbyist decorates the stick as it were in the direction of making it an image of a horse. Gombrich offers nothing further on either the motivation for or the effects of the decoration. On the second question, Gombrich starts from the idea of a ‘conceptual image’, particularly as that idea was traditionally invoked in the attempt to understand non-naturalistic visual art. The thought was that the conceptual image—roughly, a schematic image that gives an unelaborated, outline, symmetrical figure in a frontal view, marked by symmetry, with the size of parts partially determined by their importance (e.g. if a figure is a watchful god, the eyes are proportionally larger than in a naturalistic depiction). Traditionally, ‘conceptual image’ and ‘naturalistic representation’ are counter-posed, with the former most characteristic of primitive and/or non-Western art, and the latter part of Western art starting with the Ancient Greeks. Gombrich rejects such a dichotomy, but not all of its characteristics: the relatively schematic quality of the conceptual image is re-conceptualized as part of the nature of naturalistic representation itself, under the thought that representation is the achievement of a process characterized by the projection of a schema and its ‘correction’, that is, its alteration and elaboration in the direction of representation more naturalistic than that of the schema. One of Gombrich’s simple historical artistic examples of such alteration is the way in which the introduction of scientific perspective in depiction, shifts an empty patch of an artwork’s material support away from a non-signifying blank to something that signifies light, air, and space (p. 10). Gombrich’s response to the second question, with its presupposition of a uniform historical progress from conceptual image to naturalistic representation, is so evidently inadequate that I pass on discussion, that I omit discussion and turn to Summers’s second source in Meyer Schapiro.

     In order to flesh out his conception of spatial arts, Summers first takes up a suggestion from Umberto Eco’s discussion of Gombrich’s essay in his Theory of Semiotics. After rehearsing Gombrich’s account of the hobby horse, Eco notes that in play only some of the dimensions of the stick are significant in that particular context; it’s the linearity of the stick that makes it rideable, but its verticality (at least in that context) is of no significance. Eco then asserts that the linearity of the hobby horse stick is a spatial dimension, and its spatial dimensions “are not an intellectual construction, but the constructive conditions for a possible object, and as conditions they may be reproduced, equal to themselves, in varied circumstances.” (Eco, pp. 210-11) From Eco’s discussion Summers will reason that any substitute, at least if it’s a physical object or material artifact, will have constructive spatial conditions, and in an artwork such conditions include its format and the spatial environment within which the artifact is placed. Summers can then incorporate Meyer Schapiro’s famous discussion of the ‘non-mimetic’ elements of the ‘image-sign’ (and so also in artworks) into his account. Under the characterization ‘non-mimetic’ Schapiro includes artworks’ material surfaces (unworked or worked, smoothed or bumpy, rectangular or circular or unbounded, etc.) and their borders (or the absence of borders). Schapiro’s general points are that all these elements are historical phenomena, and that they can be relatively ‘neutral’ or relatively meaningful depending upon the artistic contexts in which they occur and the uses to which they are put (or not put). Schapiro’s essay greatly improves upon Gombrich’s in noting and describing how non-mimetic elements are historically introduced and elaborated as bearers of meaning; for example, Schapiro describes how the ground line, “thickened into a band and colored separately, becomes an element of landscape or architectural space. Its upper edge may be drawn as an irregular line that suggests a horizon, a terrain of rocks and hills” (Schapiro, p. 31). Summers will only have to add the point (explored at great length in his book) that the elements of presentation of a spatial artwork can also include its physical environment, through for example orientation towards the night sky, the winter solstice, or distant mountains (as with my example in the previous post from Machu Picchu).

2. Does Summers, then, offer compelling reasons for discarding the notion of the visual arts in favor of the spatial arts? I don’t think so, but also I cannot see that it greatly matters in our context whether one treats visual arts or spatial arts as basic. What matters, rather, is how the spatial and/or visual elements are put to use in the creation of artistic meaning. Summers goes over the relevant considerations both in his essays of the 1980s and in his book, but he limits himself to a few very general assertions and points. He seems to believe that traditional art historical categories are biased towards ‘perception’, or, sometimes, ‘psychology’. He seems further to think that this both induces art historians to neglect spatial categories, and that traditional categories are ‘formalist’ is some malign or impoverished sense. A quick retort to Summers’s criticisms would be that spatial arts are made to be seen (even such works as the great mosaics of La Venta, which were made then buried, were designed is ways that evidently and massively similar to countless other  works of visual art),

 and this seeing is inevitably part of human psychology. Nor has Summers offered any reasons for thinking that all of the great, mainline works in art history (Summers often cites in this context the works of Erwin Panofsky) are impoverished on account of their formalism (for the best criticism of formalist accounts known to me, one that shows how a formalist account as normally understood cannot be part of the basic levels of description and explanation of visual artworks, see Wollheim (2001)). If Summers were nonetheless to insist on treating spatial (not visual) arts as basic, our focus on artistic meaning as the putting to use of artistic elements would not be affected beyond an occasional non-substantive editorial change from the phrase ‘visual art(s)’ to the phrase ‘spatial art(s)’.

     Having fleshed out Summers’s account with the invaluable additions from Gombrich, Eco, and Schapiro, I can now turn to the basic structural distinction within the visual arts, which I shall treat under the headings of ‘aboutness’ and ‘ornament’.

References and Works Consulted:

Umberto Eco, Theory of Semiotics (1976)

E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (1960)

--‘Meditations on a Hobby-Horse or the Roots of Artistic Form’, in Meditations on a Hobby-Horse (1963)

George Kubler, The Shape of Time (1962)

Patrick Maynard, Drawing Distinctions (2005)

Michael Podro, Depiction (1998)

Meyer Schapiro, “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs”, in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society (1994)

David Summers, ‘”Form”, Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics and the4 Problem of Art Historical Description’, in Critical Inquiry (1989)

--Real Metaphor: Towards a Redefinition of the ‘Conceptual’ Image’, in Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation (1991), ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey

--Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (2003)

Richard Wollheim, ‘On Formalism and Pictorial Organization’, in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (2001)

Some Remarks on Frances McCormack’s ‘Sprites in a Thicket’ (2019): Reflection (Day Two)

I’d like to say a bit more about Frances McCormack’s remarkable ‘Sprites in a Thicket’ painting (discussed in my previous post) than I was able to think and articulate at the opening. As I noted, a part of the unfocused and unanchored impressions I had at the opening was that there was some kind of resonance with earlier art, in particular later works by Georges Braque, Arshile Gorky, and perhaps ultimately by Giovanni Bellini and followed by what Walter Pater called ‘The School of Giorgione’, the early Seicento Venetian painters. Having had the chance to reflect on this for a few days, I’ll present here a slightly more articulate version of that thinking, with a few words and some images, both of which I hope will stimulate the reader (if there indeed is any) to revisit these immensely appealing works. The brevity of the remarks next to the richness of the images will make this post seem perhaps more like the transcript of slideshow than a sustained piece of writing, but that does not strike me as a vice in this context.

     I preface these remarks with three more points directly relating to McCormack’s painting. First, in her essay in the catalog characterizes her process of painting as feeling “similar to the experience of listening to a raga”, in that there is an inherited sense of strict form combined with a maximal feel of improvisation with its openness and warding off the sense of anything seems like a final accomplishment. Something decisive must emerge, but not something that forecloses the sense of adventure. (MCormack, p. 28) Second, ‘Sprites in a Thicket’ is part of a series of closely related paintings from 2019, four of which are reproduced in the catalog. First is ‘Underground Stream’, which is closely related in structure to many of McCormack’s paintings of the two decades, such as the painting ‘Plunge’ that I reproduced in the previous post.

Like its predecessors, ‘Underground Stream’ presents a dense clustering of elements in a large ‘center’, occupying perhaps three-quarters of the canvas. This kind of formal structuring seems to me a vehicle for McCormack’s interest in maintaining a heightened sense of the paintings’ processual character, as if the form evokes the human heart simultaneously in both its phases, diastole and systole. The stylistic difference between the earlier ‘Plunge’ and the later ‘Underground Stream’ is evident in the shifts from mature to late style (again, described in my previous post) with the latter’s simplifications, use of solid planes of color, and juxtapositions instead of transitions. ‘Underground Stream’, like a number of McCormack’s works after the year 2000, also contains part of a column from the Classical orders, here a diagrammatic depiction of a Corinthian capital.

     The other two works of this group from 2019, ‘Sprites Near a Creek’:

And ‘The Conversation’:

finally dispense with the central clustering in favor of more even emphasis across the full canvas through bare juxtaposition of the thin vertical rectangles of the trees, with solid planes of background interspersed in the service of suggesting varying spatial depths. ‘The Conversation’, like ‘Underground Stream’ (an unlike the other two) explicitly depicts part of a Corinthian column in a white-line rendering upon a rectangle that is part black artifact, part gray-blue tree. The horizontal branch connecting the columnar tree with its fully natural neighbor to the left must be, so it seems to me, seen as a direct reminiscence of Bernini’s statue of Daphne turning into a tree to avoid rape by Apollo:

     The third preliminary point has already been foreshadowed, which is ‘Sprites in a Thicket’ comes at the end of nearly two decades of use of column and tree as metaphors of each other, or perhaps as two renderings, by nature and by artifice, of primal elements of color, plane, gravity, and space. It’s noteworthy then that ‘Sprites in a Thicket’ does not contain the explicit columnar representation, and so one can ask the question (which admits of no definite answer but, as Kant said about artistic ideas, gives rise to much thought) why such explicit representation is omitted (or suppressed?). I only suggest here that it is a feature of late phases of a genre, as it is of late style, that elements that are typical and central are eliminated in the service of a greater immediacy, though they cannot really be eliminated as specters surrounding a work.

     Now let’s recall two episodes from the poetic prehistory of McCormack’s painting. By what must be sheer chance, two of the greatest painters of the first half of the twentieth-century, Georges Braque and Arshile Gorky, each began almost simultaneously with the other a series of paintings of major ambition: Braque began his ‘Atelier’ series in 1939 that in the mid-1950s ultimately contained nine works, and from 1940 to 1942 Gorky painted perhaps eight works in his ‘Garden in Sochi’ series. Braques’s series has long been recognized as the masterpiece of his later period, and Gorky’s series has come to be seen as the crucial body of work marking the abandonment of his discipleship, especially to Picasso, and, although marked by the new orienting figure of Joan Miró, the series within which his mature style seemed to emerge, though not culminate. In the first painting of Braques’s series, ‘Studio (The Vase Before a Window)’ of 1939, Braques’s life-long concern with exploration of the space between objects and his post-1914 concern to develop the implications of the Synthetic Cubist spatial effects of juxtaposing colored planes takes the form of a new grid-like planarity:

Objects—a table, a chair, a palette, etc.—are outlined in white, and their placement across vertical planes of alternately wallpaper, wood grain, and monochrome renders both their situatedness within the space and their mutual relations irresolvably ambiguous. The two window grilles divide the sky itself into planes consubstantial with the other planes, and the relation between interior and exterior inherits the ambiguities of the interior elements.

     With the ‘Garden in Sochi’ series Gorky, under the guidance of Miró, has left behind Picasso’s cubist space in favor of biomorphic forms situated uncertainly—in, on, or next to?—a solid olive green expanse.

Space vanishes in favor of metamorphosis, as the markers of delimitation and outline of the shapes are deprived of the consistency that would allow the viewer to acquire a feel for the identities of the forms. (For a penetrating discussion, see Golding, pp. 316-19) Mostly the forms simply touch or run up to the olive green, but there are also uses of both white and black lines to mark edges and internal differentiations.

     Braques’s exploration of space, and Gorky’s highlighting of the metaphoric processuality of the figures are both taken up into McCormack’s painting, and both fuse with the large-scale structure of a series. For the series—Braques’ Ateliers, Gorky’s Gardens in Sochi, Mccormack’s Sprites of 2019—suggests another way in which McCormack’s concern with holding off definition gains artistic expression. One senses that no work is definitive; nothing can count as an exhaustion of the possibilities of the reservoir of motifs, styles of rendering, and artistic concerns that give the series its open-ended unity.

     A second episode from the prehistory of McCormack’s painting, and one of the greatest in the world’s artistic painting, is the discovery and development of a landscape poetics of memory and imagination in the late work of Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione. For Bellini I’ll only cite the ‘Sacred Allegory’ of c. 1500-04 that was on loan to the Getty Center in Los Angeles about seven years ago:

In the magnificent study of the poetics of Venetian artistic painting of this period, Johannes Wilde notes that in this late work Bellini has abandoned the kind of patchwork depiction of space and recession that he had introduced around 1470. Consider the detail of the contemplative figure in a cave in the far middle ground/near background  

in light of Wilde’s stylistic description: “Very little remains of the stage-set, alternating in a zig-zag of forms which built up Bellini’s earlier landscapes; nevertheless, though the parallel zone, distinguished one from another by slight modifications of tone, a slow recession is achieved, offering us homely sights that make this religious allegory a panorama of our world” (Wilde, p. 40) With the use of parallel elements Bellini undoes something of the coldness so typical of late Quattrocento perspective, where figures seem puppets set into a pre-existing and indifferent spatial grid. Instead, in Bellini and then fully in Giorgione, the figure is a thing of its immediate environment, or conversely something that exudes its own surroundings as a projection and concretization of its own mental state. Imagination and memory are as real in this poetics as the material thing. In the canonical statement of this poetics, Walter Pater noted that in the Alpine landscapes of the Venetian school of Giorgione, the painters only retain “cool colour and tranquilising line”. Music and the whole auditory sensorium is never far from this depicted “country of the pure reason or half-imaginative memory”. In the school of Giorgione  “life itself is conceived as a sort of listening”, and “when people are happy in this thirsty land water will not be far off”. (Pater (1873)) Not for the last time, McCormack has re-invented and re-invigorated Giorgionesque poetry for the contemporary world.

I break off here, in hopes that I’ve said enough to open the reader to some of the deeper and subtler resonances of McCormack’s painting. Nothing in my experience of the painting suggests that the resonances are exhaustible.

References and Works Consulted:

Matthew Gale, Arshile Gorky: Enigma and Nostalgia (2010)

John Golding, Visions of the Modern (1994)

Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 2: Arrogant Purpose 1945-49

Patrick Heron, The Changing Forms of Art (1958)

Signe S. Mayfield and Frances McCormack, Frances McCormack: Rooted in Wonder: Paintings, 1984-2024 (2025)

Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873)

Harry Rand, Arshile Gorky: The Implications of Symbols (1980)

William Seitz, Arshile Gorky: Paintings, Drawings, Studies (1962)

Kim S. Theriault, Rethinking Arshile Gorky (2009)

Johannes Wilde, Venetian Art from Bellini to Titian (1974)

Karen Wilkin, Braque (1991)

Some Remarks on Frances McCormack’s ‘Sprites in a Thicket’ (2019): Perception (Day One)

A few days ago I was fortunate to see the Bay Area painter Frances McCormack’s retrospective at the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art. I’ve known her work well for nearly 40 years, and first wrote on it in 1991. At the opening I was particularly struck by her painting ‘Sprites in a Thicket’ from 2019, which struck me as part of a new phase, perhaps the beginnings of a ‘late style’ wherein (as famously characterized by the social philosopher and music critic Theodor Adorno) the artist withdraws the charms and sweetness of her mature style, turns harmonies into dissonances, and aims for a barer expression of her basic concerns than she could achieve within the stylistic monument—or is it a prison?—of her earlier works. In late work the artist breaks the bonds of her former form in order “to cast off the appearance of art”.  The late work “still remains process, but not as development; rather as a catching fire between the extremes” (Adorno, pp. 566-67). I found it hard to leave the work, and spent most of my visit looking at it, and talking about it with my companions. Frances told me that the couple who own the work were curious about what that odd man, looking and talking so animatedly, was saying. I volunteered to write it up and stick it on my blog. When I first was trying to come to grips with the characteristics and values of this dawning late style, I found myself inarticulately thinking ‘There’s something about transitional Arshile Gorky and later Georges Braque here, something that goes back to late Bellini’. I’m not done with thinking about the painting, and so will present here on the blog some remarks in two parts. First there’ll be a cleaned- and -gussied-up version of what I thought and said at the opening, then an attempt to draw out the painting’s historical resonances. Two parts, then: ‘Perception (Day One)’ and ‘Reflection (Day Two)’.

     ‘Sprites in a Thicket’ shows the lower trunks of perhaps a dozen trees near what seems to be a shallow pond, perhaps vernal, whose surface is rendered in patches of blues, reds, various greens, and blacks. The water is streaked and ruffled, sometimes with undulating horizontal lines, sometimes with the vertical drips of paint characteristic of McCormack’s works, and here partially obscured and scumbled with liquid horizontal patches of pink and blue-gray. The ‘sprites’ seem to be first of all the two tangles of tendrils (McCormack’s signature motif) which seem uncertainly attached front and back to the nearest trees. Another possible sprite is the roughly globular shape on lower left, faintly suggestive of a large walnut and rendered in with ham-fisted outlines that contrast sharply with the fluidity of the tendrils’ strokes. More distantly possible candidates for sprites are the two bushes, one at the near left presented in graceful cursive silhouettes,

the one on the right more distant and made of solid monochromes and backlit, providing with the thin tree just behind it an otherwise unavailable sense of the direction of light.

The relative size of the trees and the visual occlusions among them provide the large-scale sense of space. With the more distant trees the transition between tree and ground is sudden and sharp; these trees have no roots, but their visual solidity lends them a weight that stabilizes them in the otherwise unstable and perhaps swampy ground. The bottom of the dark tree in the center tumbles out in an unnaturalistic scumble, and the nearest tree seems to merge at its lowest part with the foreground tendril, which itself stretches to the nearest pool and shares its substance. A striking feature of the trees is their uniformly cut-off branches, which for the most part extend into the proximal plane of the background or a neighboring tree, then suddenly end. Not long after making this painting, McCormack turned to collage, and here already with these sharply juxtaposed planes, connected only with the branches’ outlines, the poetics of collage seeps into the oil-painting.

      To see something of the break in McCormack’s poetics marked with the painting, consider a typical earlier work such as ‘Plunge’ of 2009:

Here the tendril is the foremost and focal element, and one that carries most immediately McCormack’s with presenting the sense of simultaneous emergence and decay, and also with the sense of the tendril as a kind of strange attractor, something that entices and traps the viewer’s attention (as in the anthropologist Alfred Gell’s characterization of artworks as traps set for the viewer), sends the viewer into the other elements of the work, out of which the viewer endlessly returns to the tendril. In her mature style, I would suggest, elements and details overwhelmingly function in light of the contribution they make to the sense of the whole and the visual paths of which they form parts. The great change in ‘Sprites in the Forest’, I think, stems from two great shifts. First, details such as the bushes are given a sense of integrity, dwelling points for attention, and so do not lose their individuality in the whirl of the painting’s connections. Second, whereas in the earlier works the canvas, the material surface of the painting, tended to remain artistically inert as a mere atmospheric background of shallow depth. In the late style, the collage-like use of monochromes and juxtapositions immediately identifies the pigment with the material surface. Charm is sacrificed for something more immediate, more startling, more unassimilable. I love it.

     So much for my initial impression at the opening. In my next post I’ll reflect on the nature of McCormack’s achievement here, with particular attention to Arshile Gorky’s transitional series of paintings from the late 1930s to early 1940s referred to individually as ‘Garden in Sochi’.

References and Works Consulted:

Theodor Adorno, ‘Late Style in Beethoven’ (1937), in Essays on Music (2002)

Matthew Gale, Arshile Gorky: Enigma and Nostalgia (2010)

Alfred Gell, ‘The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology’ and ‘Vogel’s Nets: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps’, in The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams (1999)

--Art and Agency (1998)

John Golding, Visions of the Modern (1994)

Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 2: Arrogant Purpose 1945-49

Patrick Heron, The Changing Forms of Art (1958)

Signe S. Mayfield and Frances McCormack, Frances McCormack: Rooted in Wonder: Paintings, 1984-2024 (2025)

Harry Rand, Arshile Gorky: The Implications of Symbols (1980)

William Seitz, Arshile Gorky: Paintings, Drawings, Studies (1962)

Kim S. Theriault, Rethinking Arshile Gorky (2009)

Johannes Wilde, Venetian Art from Bellini to Titian (1974)

Karen Wilkin, Braque (1991)

The World in an Eye, First Draft, Part 11b: David Summers’s Real Spaces

I turn now to the question of the right kind of account of the visual arts for our purposes, that is, one that offers illumination on the distinctive nature, if there is indeed one, of artistic meaning in the visual arts. There are perhaps two very general considerations guiding the choice of the appropriate kind of account. The first consideration is the scope of the account: What should we treat as the kinds of art at the core of the visual arts? The second consideration concerns the relationship between the nature of an artifact qua artwork, and the artifact’s artistic meaning. At a limit there might be cases (perhaps Duchamp’s Fountain is an example) artistic status and artistic meaning are tightly bound because the artwork’s meaning is to a great degree the result of it embodying reflection upon its artistic status. The content of such a work is in part the question ‘Am I a work of art, and why or why not?’ Status and meaning are recto and verso. For a vast range of more ordinary cases, one might think that artistic status is at most a precondition for the activation of artistic meaning: the viewer initially recognizes that the artwork—this painting, this drawing, this sculpture—is intended as a work of art, and so the viewer approaches the work with the kinds of perception, attention, imagination, and exploration solicited by and regularly rewarded by the work. For such cases one might think that status is one thing, meaning a very different thing. But there is something intuitively implausible and unappealing about such an account, and it seems preferable to look for an account where the some of the same kind of perceptual, affective, and cognitive resources that are mobilized in recognizing something as an artwork are also deployed in perceiving and coming to understand its meaning. So the second relevant consideration would be that, if possible, to find or construct an account wherein the mechanisms of artistic meaning do not seem ad hoc or merely added on to the mechanisms wherewith artistic status is recognized. (Patrick Maynard raises very similar points with regard to the right sort of account of perception in the visual arts in Maynard, p. xix).

     As I have indicated, I’ll here adopt David Summers’s account of what he calls the spatial arts, an account he views as a replacement of and improvement upon existing accounts of the visual arts. In my presentation I’ll shift some of emphases and make some explicit connections that are perhaps more latent in Summers’s book, but I believe the summary is very largely true to Summers’s letter and spirit. On Summers’s view, the most fundamental action in the making of spatial art is the creation of a ‘real metaphor’, which arises when “we actual do put something at hand in place of something else, something else which is absent or not actually or practically present, that is, not present in a way that allows it to be treated or addressed”. The fundamental effect of a real metaphor is its making “the absent present by the transfer of what is already at hand”. (Summers, p. 257) Summers’s initial example of a real metaphor is a stone that is set up in such a way that it is understood to take the place of a dead chieftain. The stone qua real metaphor “is the most basic means by which substitution is effected, issuing directly from the most basic conditions of human spatiality, both presence and absence” (ibid). The etymology of ‘metaphor’ (as with the Latinate ‘transport) is the Ancient Greek ‘meta’ (across) and ‘pherein’ (to bear or carry), and the stone is literally taken from one place to another. The stone-metaphor is ‘real’ in the sense that it is an actual, physical object set in actual space. In the world’s art the stone is almost always elaborated and enhanced, in one or more of a few basic ways: part or all of the surface may be smoothed or shaped as a preparation for further adornment, such as painting; the stone as a whole may be shaped so as to present an icon or resemblance, such as a statue of an elephant; some or all of the stone may be ornamented. Further, the spatial placement of the stone may be elaborated and enhanced: the stone may be placed upon an elevation, such as a mound or a pedestal, and/or the stone may be aligned with its physical environment, such as distant mountains, surrounding buildings, or streets leading up to and away from the stone.--Perhaps the actual artwork closest to this model is the so-called sacred stone of Machu Picchu, which is only lightly worked and set so as to echo the distant mountains:

 In the proto-instance of a real metaphor the stone is first of all open to visual perception, but there may be further elaboration by hiding the stone behind a curtain or in a structure, or in many cases making it inaccessible by burying it. Put summarily, on my revised version of Summers’s account a work of spatial (or visual) art is a real metaphor qua placed artifact whose conditions of presentation and elaborations (potentially) form part of its artistic meaning.

     Summers writes that the initial stimuli for his account were his having taken seminars with George Kubler on Precolumbian art, and then later trying to teach courses on that art; he came to think that the description and explanation of such art needed categories other than those used in standard art history to account for, say, Italian Renaissance art. In his massive book he attempts to account for an enormous range of the world’s art, but it is not hard to see the appropriateness of the concept of real metaphor for explaining broad features of Mesoamerican art. From among many examples, consider his brief remarks on the Olmec center of La Venta, which flourished c. 800 BCE.

La Venta was, along with the slightly earlier San Lorenzo, one of the major ceremonial centers of the Olmecs. Complexes of buildings are oriented on an axis eight degrees off the true north-south axis. Summers notes that La Venta contains “large burials of hundreds of slabs of green stone, brought from the Pacific coast, smoothed on their upper and lower faces, and stacked course upon course in alignment with the north-south axis governing the rigorous overall symmetry of plazas, platforms, and sculptures” (p. 86). The first chapter of Summers’s book is devoted to facture, the sense that the real metaphor has been worked, and so becomes an artifact, which carries in train (very much as we saw in our own discussion of artifactuality) the sense of intention and purpose. An outstanding feature of La Venta are its many deposits—mosaics, figures, and polished jade celts (quasi-axe heads).

Discussing some stacked and buried greenstones, Summers writes: “The Olmec worked green stone in many forms, and these massive concentrations of it were perhaps meant to animate the place with the power of the stone . . . their value was not complete, or was not fully articulated, until they had been distinguished by facture [in particular by shaping and smoothing]” (p. 87). The effect of this is to give the stones “an enhanced value complementary to the intrinsic value of the stone, and at the same time related them to the aligned, also evidently planar order of the ritual centre as a whole” (ibid).

     One readily sees the elective affinity of Summers’s account with the points about the previously discussed great resources of artistic meaningfulness, particularly with regard to embodiment and artifactuality. Further, Summers’s account meets the general requirements for a sufficiently capacious account of the visual arts introduced above: the basic kinds of meaningfulness—enhancements, iconicity, ornamentation—arise from the character of the real metaphor itself, not as ad hoc additions; the account lends itself to correlating drawing, painting, sculpture, and architecture, and then treating further visual arts, such as masking and scene-painting, as enhancements and accompaniments of the core art forms. Additionally, this account draws our attention to the fundamental role of the concepts of presence and absence at the bases of artistic meaningfulness, something that will become especially prominent in the treatment of masks.

     In order to make the transition from the basic account of real metaphor to more particular accounts of ornament and the artforms of painting, drawing, and sculpture, in the next I’ll consider Summers’s key theoretical source in E. H. Gombrich’s essay ‘Meditations on a Hobby-Horse’, which shifts the conceptual core of the visual arts away from the concept of an image, together with the characteristic concerns with visual representation, to the notion of substitution.

References and Works Consulted:

Claudia Brittenham, Unseen Art: Making, Vision, and Power in Ancient Mesoamerica (2023)

E. H. Gombrich, ‘Meditations on a Hobby-Horse or the Roots of Artistic Form’, in Meditations on a Hobby-Horse (1963)

George Kubler, The Art and Architecture of Ancient America (1962)

David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (2003)

The World in an Eye, First Draft, Part 11a: The Shape of the Theory of Artistic Meaning

Having completed my blogging excursion to the artistic conceptions of nature on the other side of the San Gabriel Mountains, I return to the first draft of my book on the philosophy of artistic meaning in the visual arts. I have completed my initial survey of the great resources of such artistic meaningfulness that are species-wide: embodiment, metaphoricity, gesture, language, and visual perception. Initially I had proposed a conception of artistic meaning, one inspired in particular by the writings of the philosophers Michael Podro and Patrick Maynard, wherein artistic meaning (a term that plays no substantive role for either philosopher) arises from the project of ‘sustaining recognition’, so the resources identified are meant to be understood in terms of their possible roles in sustaining recognition.  I have indicated two major mechanisms of artistic meaning wherewith such resources are mobilized: projection and evocation (the former discussed at much greater length than the latter). Finally, I stated, at least half-seriously, a quasi-principle guiding the analysis of artistic meaning: All Restriction is (potentially) an Expansion. So now I turn to the task of the second major part of the book, which is introducing and explicating through demonstration kinds of resources of artistic meaningfulness that are more specific to the visual arts, which on my account will involve a heterogeneous range of elements, especially those involved in representation, expression, materiality, ornamentation, and masking.

     As indicated at the conclusion of my last post of the first draft, my account of the more specific resources will be largely adopted from the one given by the art historian David Summers in his book Real Spaces. Before turning to that account, I’d like to offer a bit more on what our philosophical understanding of artistic meaning should include. To this end I shall consider in a brief and summary way some basic considerations for the analysis of meaning generally that have been prominently offered in philosophy in the past three-quarters of a century. If there is anything approaching consensus on this matter, it would be the statement that the term ‘meaning’ means many things. One crude way of approaching this range would be to divide it roughly into two major orientations. On one orientation the term ‘meaning’ has its focal sense in the phrase ‘the meaning of life’, and in related conceptions such as ‘a meaningful (or meaningless) practice’; in the other its focal sense is in ‘meaning in language’ or linguistic meaning. Again in a very rough way with a great many exceptions, the former orientation tends to occur more among so-called Continental philosophers, the latter in Analytic philosophers. For the past forty years one of my rules of thumb in my own philosophical attempts has been to try to maintain something of the existential seriousness of the Continentals combined with something of the concern for intelligibility and ‘precision’ (always for me a context-specific and non-binding conception) of the Analytics. How might this rule guide the investigation of artistic meaning?

     Consider some of the most prominent investigations of ‘meaning’ from the Continentals. Mark Johnson suggests a minimal conception of ‘meaning’ as relatedness: “Human meaning concerns the character and significance of a person’s interactions with their environments. The meaning of a specific aspect or dimension of some ongoing experience is that aspect’s connections to other parts of past, present, or future (possible) experiences. Meaning is relational. It is about how one thing relates to or connects with other things.” (Johnson (2007), p. 10; for his explicit rejection of meaning as primarily linguistic, see his (2018), p. 51) Johnson goes on to explicate meaningfulness in the manner I have already summarized in the sections on embodiment and projection. Susan Wolf (an honorary Continental for our purposes) in her book on meaning in life writes that meaning “is commonly associated with a kind of depth” (Wolf, p. 7); that it arises from loving objects worthy of love and engaging with them in a positive way” ( p. 8); and that it “involves subjective and objective elements, suitably and inextricably linked” (p.9). Johnson and Wolf go on unsurprisingly to explicate the concept of meaning in differing ways in light of their different concerns, but we can retain their marks of the concept of meaning of (a) something related to depth of understanding of the context of phenomena, insofar as the phenomena elicit and sustain interest, attachment, and/or involvement.

     The Hungarian philosopher Michael Polanyi offers a maximal conception of meaning. Polanyi was concerned to analyze meaning in terms of his basic analysis of attention in terms of a ‘from-to’ structure, wherein something is focally attended ‘to’ via a backgrounding ‘from’ structure, frame, or element. On this account, meaning (in contrast to the bare linguistic conception of some linguistic sign ‘meaning’ (or standing for) some referent) is always a kind of holistic achievement wherein that which is attended to is also grasped as part of some non-focal context. As he writes in his master work Personal Knowledge: “The more clear-cut cases of meaning are those in which one thing (e.g. a word) means another thing (e.g. an object). In this case the corresponding wholes are perhaps not obvious, but we may legitimately follow Tolman in amalgamating sign and object into one whole. Other kinds of things, like a physiognomy, a tune or a pattern are manifestly wholes but this time their meaning is somewhat problematic, for though they are clearly not meaningless, they mean something only in themselves. The distinction between two kinds of awareness allows us readily to acknowledge these two kinds of wholes and two kinds of meaning. . . anything that functions effectively within an accredited context has a meaning in that context and . . . any such context will itself be appreciated as meaning. We may describe the kind of meaning which a context possess in itself as existential, to distinguish it especially from denotative or, more generally, representative meaning.” (Polanyi (1958), p. 58) The largest context for understanding the achievement of meaning is the basic human project of understanding oneself and the world and finding and/or making oneself at home in the world. As Polanyi put it in a generalizing mode characteristic of philosophical anthropology:  “Man lives in the meanings he is able to discern. He extends himself into that which he finds coherent and is at home there. These meanings can be of many kinds of things.” (Polanyi and Prosch, p. 66) If nothing else, Polanyi’s philosophical anthropology provides a larger frame of intelligibility for the phenomenon of meaning that locates the concern for context, depth of understanding, and involvement with general human interests, needs, desires, and projects.

     What of the Analytic tradition with regard to meaning? One might outline the Analytic concern by noting its major sources and influences. On a standard account this tradition arises in response to the logician Gottlob Frege’s late19th-century attempts to develop a new conception of logic suited to analyzing the foundations of arithmetic and geometry; a later part of this project a proposed analysis of thoughts as, first, expressed in language possessing a structure of function and argument, and then the beginning of an account of how aspects of linguistic expression in terms of the distinctions among reference (‘Bedeutung’, what is being referred to), sense (‘Sinn’, the manner in which the reference is presented), and force (the manner in which the thought is presented, in particular as asserted, entertained, or questioned). A crucial aspect is the so-called ‘context principle’ whereby the meaning of (logical and/or linguistic) parts is understood in terms of their contribution to the meaning of the whole thought or utterance. Frege’s writings were taken up Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein and subjected to a great deal of criticism and re-formulation, contributions that in turn formed the basis of an efflorescence of Analytic philosophy of meaning most prominently in the writings of W. V. O. Quine, Hilary Putnam, Michael Dummett, Donald Davidson, and Gareth Evans, themselves stimulating countless further papers with criticisms and revised conceptions.

     For our limited purposes I’ll sketch Michael Dummett’s account of meaning. Please keep in mind that this is an idealized re-construction that blithely ignores the lengthy arguments, re-formulations, qualifications, and nuances that Dummett gave in developing his account over a half-century. Put crudely, Dummett proceeds as follows: He starts from the thoughts that meaning is correlated with understanding (that is, when we understand something, we understand its meaning), that meaning is expressed in language, and that an account of meaning must be first of all an account of language and its meaning-bearing structures. He draws from two great sources: Frege’s conceptions (to which he devotes more than one thousand published pages), and the later Wittgenstein’s thought that ‘meaning is use’  (oddly, Dummett ignores the fact that Wittgenstein does not assert such a thought and such a claim, but rather says that if he were to propose something like a theory of linguistic meaning, it would be the slogan ‘meaning is use’; I can’t see that this nuance matters in the context of presenting Dummett’s own views). Dummett accepts the basic structure of Frege’s analyses (that is, the function-and-argument analysis of linguistic utterance, and the need in each case to make out the distinctions among reference, sense, and force) In light of Wittgenstein’s (alleged) claim, Dummett criticizes Frege for having neglected the conditions for recognizing and acknowledging the use of a linguistic utterance, and insists that these conditions crucially involve the question of the (possible or actual) truth or falsity of the utterance. So a further part of a theory of meaning is a theory of truth. Very crudely, then, one might say that Dummett’s paradigmatically Analytic account of meaning involves a theory of linguistic structure, a theory of the force of linguistic utterances, together with a truth-oriented theory of linguistic use.

     The Continental and the Analytic traditions have for the most part in practice ignored each other. Among the rare instances of mutual regard, Dummett, for example, has sympathetically explicated Edmund Husserl’s account of meaning as intentionality, and shrugged that it seems to offer nothing comparable to the detail and precision of Frege’s account. On the Continental side (to which I adhere in orientation), A. W. Moore (another honorary member) has noted that with regard to metaphysical issues Dummett’s account is of a piece of the ‘linguacentrism’ that afflicts other Analytic figures (such as Carnap, Quine, and David Lewis) and so misses the more interesting and challenging questions of how we make sense, and whether and how we might need to invent new concepts and conceptual schemes in order to make sense of our making sense (see Moore, p. 366). Mark Johnson and the cognitive linguist George Lakoff have provided the most sustained and convincing critical rejection of the Analytic conception, noting (especially with regard to Quine) how that whole tradition contains enormous explanatory gaps relating to how formal analyses (such as Frege’s) relate to natural languages (Lakoff and Johnson, pp. 99-100) and generally presupposes a conception of disembodied minds and knowledge mysteriously related a fixed, mind-independent reality).

     Despite endorsing Moore’s and Johnson’s and Lakoff’s criticisms, I wish to import something of the structure of Dummett’s account of (linguistic) meaning into my own account of artistic meaning, both in terms of the various elements that must be considered (structure, force, use, etc.) and specifically in adopting something like the context principle. For example, by keeping the context principle in mind we can perhaps give greater precision to Polanyi’s remarks about the relation between parts and wholes in meaning. In any case, with something like Dummett’s account energized with Analytic points, in the next I turn to the introduction and explication of the fundamental account of the elements of the visual (or spatial) arts given by David Summers.

References and Works Consulted:

Michael Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language (1973)

--‘Theory of Meaning (I)’, ‘Theory of Meaning (II)’, and ‘Truth and Meaning’, in The Seas of Language (1992)

--‘The Philosophical Significance of Gödel’s Theorem’ and ‘Can Analytical Philosophy be Systematic, and Ought it to Be?’, in Truth and Other Enigmas (1978)

--‘Meaning and Understanding’, in The Interpretation of Frege’s Philosophy (1981)

--‘Truth and Meaning’, in Origins of Analytical Philosophy (1994)

Gottlob Frege, The Frege Reader (1997)

E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (1960)

--‘Meditations on a Hobby-Horse’(1950s), in Meditations on a Hobby-Horse

Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (2007)

-- The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought: The Bodily Roots of Philosophy, Science, Morality, and Art (2018)

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (1999)

Patrick Maynard, Drawing Distinctions (2005)

A. W. Moore, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (2012)

Michael Podro, Depiction (1998)

Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (1958)

Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning (1975)

Hilary Putnam, ‘How Not to Talk About Meaning’ and  ‘The Meaning of ‘Meaning’’, in Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2: Mind, Language, and Reality (1975)

David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (2003)

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953)

Susan Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (2012)

Artistic Ontologies of Nature in Los Angeles, Day Two, Part Two: Joseph Beuys as Le Nouvel Novalis

Artistic Ontologies of Nature in Los Angeles, Day Two, Part Two: Joseph Beuys as Le Nouvel Novalis

      In my previous post I briefly considered, mostly by way of quotation and a shrug, the most prominent criticisms in English of the work of Joseph Beuys, both of his public character as an artist and (seemingly) of his art, in particular the criticisms associated with the journal October given by Benjamin Buchloh, Eric Michaud, and Rosalind Krauss. The combination of the extreme hostility of the criticisms and their lack of specificity (no work or project by Beuys is discussed even briefly in these writings) combine to make it impossible to offer any serious response. As I stated at the end of that post, I hope that a reader will conclude that there’s nothing in those criticisms to discourage the viewer from attending to Beuys’s work. Michaud’s piece did contribute the thought that it makes sense to speak of ‘Beuys’s ecology’, and that it involves giving form to soil and language, and that it makes no distinction between what is ‘given to man’ and what ‘man produces’. Michaud of course gives no relevant quotations from Beuys, nor does he show how the lack of distinction between what is given and what is made effects Beuys’s art. Is there anything in Michaud’s remarks? And what, more generally, can we say about Beuys’s artistic ontology of nature in relation to the exhibition at The Broad in Los Angeles?

     I’ll begin with a sketch of Beuys’s core conceptions, and then consider two of his later pieces that are very partially presented The Broad Museum’s ‘In Defense of Nature’ exhibition, his iconic 7,000 Oaks inaugurated at Documenta in 1982, and the project ‘In Defense of Nature’ itself, inaugurated in Italy in 1984, the year before his death. I omit a survey of Beuys’s career, as there are many overviews in English and the main points are quite well-known (from many possibilities, I particularly recommend Ann Temkin’s short account in Temkin (1993)). Beuys produced a vast amount of material—writings, lectures, interviews, and recorded discussion—wherein he presents and elaborates his artistic conceptions. There are two inter-related foci to his explications. First, there is his repeated claim that ‘Everyone is an artist’; and second there is his claim to be creating and practicing an artistic conception of ‘social sculpture’. In order to understand Beuys’s work, it is crucial to keep in mind the status of these claims. Beuys does not present them as so to speak postulates of his work, or conceptions that are determinate in advance of the actual making and reception of any of his works. Rather, whatever determinate meaning they have is only ever partial, and can only rightly be thought to emerge at the end of the reception of his work. As he put it with regard to the first claim, “So when I assert that everyone is an artist, that is the outcome of my work rather than a fact I assume everyone must believe.” (quoted in Mensch, p. 114) Similarly with regard to his conception of social sculpture, he says that it is an extension and radicalization of the traditional conception of sculpture, but he gives no further characterization of it other than that artworks and artistic projects made under that conception include in an open-ended way include the actions and perceptions of artistic co-workers and viewers. He insists that his conceptions, particularly the first, are anthropological conceptions, wherewith he opposes traditional or bourgeois or Western conceptions. In one of his countless formulations, “I extend the concept of art in a radical way, and make it anthropological one” (Beuys (2004), p. 71; my quote here is severely truncated from a longer remark wherein Beuys is characterizing creativity as a way of giving form to things that is not restricted to human action).

     It’s quite illuminating, I believe, to consider Beuys’s source for the idea that everyone is an artist. The biographical literature on Beuys notes that after World War II he studied the thought of the German Romantic philosophers, and that he seems to have first encountered there certain ideas that were taken up from his most prominent influence, the mystic and so-called anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner. It seems to me that although Steiner provided Beuys with his frequently employed lecture + blackboard drawings format, his core conceptions of art and artist come to him straight from the German Romantic poet and philosopher Novalis. Beuys’s ‘Everybody is an Artist’ seems to be derived from a passage in Novalis’s ‘Faith and Love or The King and Queen’ (1798): “A true prince is the artist of artists; that is, he is the director of artists. Every person should be an artist. Everything can become a fine art. Artists are the prince’s material; his will is his chisel: he teaches, engages, and instructs the artists, because only he can oversee the picture as a whole from the right standpoint, because only to him the great idea, which is to be represented and executed through combined forces and ideas, is perfectly present.” (Novalis, pp. 95-6) As adopted and transformed by Beuys, Novalis’s idea is that if each person is/can be an artist by virtue of creatively participating in Beuys’s collective projects, then Beuys is himself a sort of second-order artist, equal to the first-order artists qua creative participants, but with a further second-order status by virtue of initiating the projects. Beuys of course drops Novalis’s presumption that the second-order artist can ever get into a position to oversee the project as a whole, if for no other reason than that the projects in principle have no conclusion. Novalis elsewhere in the so-called ‘Logological Fragments’ writes that the artist “stands on the human being as a statue does on a pedestal” (p. 55); first-order and second-order artists are equally statues emergent from the capacities and materialities of human nature, and perhaps this point, which is meant to be applicable trans-historically and trans-culturally, indicates most clearly what Beuys meant in calling his conception ‘anthropological’.

      What of nature? Animals—stags, bees, swans, coyotes—are recurrent motifs in Beuys’s work across his entire career, and he also exhibits a strong interest in natural phenomena and objects such as trees, stones, and geological processes. Beuys has said that “THERE CAN BE NO ARTISTIC ACTIVITY WITHOUT AN AWARENESS OF NATURE” (Tomassoni, p. 82, quoting Beuys (capitals in the original)). Why not? Presumably because of the open-ended or non-restrictive use of materials and invocations of agents in Beuys’s work. As Beuys put it (here I give the full quote that I truncated above): “So if I extend the concept of art in a radical way, and make it anthropological one—taking the starting point for creativity as inherent in thinking, which it turn is capable of creating forms in the world, then I also have to say that there are forms parallel to the ones I produce, that are not made by the human being.”  (Beuys (2004), p. 71).

     Beuys’s conceptualizations tie the awareness of nature to the artistic process more tightly and intimately than is generally recognized. ‘Social sculpture’ is after all an extension and radicalization of sculpture as traditionally conceived, and a basic contrast in sculpture transculturally is between sculpting conceived as building up relatively neutral materials into something formed and meaningful, and sculpting conceived as removing extraneous material to reveal a form within the object (the block of marble, the branch) that the artist started from. This distinction is usually given as between modelling and carving. Beuys mobilizes this distinction throughout his work, usually preferring modelling as more appropriately to organic forms, but notes that even natural processes can be understood as and recruited into artworks as modelled or carved: at one point he distinguishes pebbles from crystals in that pebbles are the result of ‘taking away’ (i.e. ‘carved’) by natural forces, and crystals the result of ‘building up’ (i.e. ‘modelled). (Beuys (2004), pp. 60-1).

     With Beuys’s basic artistic claims so explicated, the conception of nature as an aspect of art (and so not something set over against art as in the schematic dichotomy nature vs. culture) involved in his work is apparent (p. 63). 7,000 Oaks consists not just of the planted trees, but also for each tree there is an accompanying large stone (so organic and inorganic, modelling and carving). Beuys has said that he chose the number 7,000 because of the traditional association of the number 7 with a rule for planting trees, and the number 1000 suggesting myriads and a forest (Beuys (1990), p. 111). The later work ‘In Defense of Nature’ extends this conception to include the planting of 7,000 trees in northern Italy and in the Seychelles, planting seeds in remote areas by dropping seed-embedded clay balls from a helicopter, and exhibiting various related materials such as old agricultural equipment (Tomassini, pp. 132-140).

     In different ways, then, Beuys along with his fellow denizens of the greater Los Angeles region Cai Guo-Qiang and Paul Cézanne offer artistic conceptions of nature that break with the rigid nature vs. culture dichotomy that might be thought to afflict so much of European and North American arts. Whereas Cai may offer the most spectacular recruitment of natural processes into artistic meaning, and Cézanne may offer the greatest results for close artistic attention, Beuys’s conception is perhaps the most forward-looking, at least if there is any future for humanity, either to ward off, or to reconstruct after, the coming ecological collapse.

 References and Works Consulted:

 Joseph Beuys, Joseph Beuys in America: Energy Plan for the Western Man (1990)

---What is Art? Conversation with Joseph Beuys (2004)

Lucrezia de Domizio Durini, Joseph Beuys: Difesa della Natura (1996)

Claudia Mesch, Joseph Beuys (2017)

Novalis, ‘Logological Fragments I’ and ‘Faith and Love or The King and Queen’, in Novalis: Philosophical Writings (1997)

Ann Temkin, Thinking is Form: The Drawings of Joseph Beuys (1993)

Italo Tomassoni, Beuys in Perugia (2003)

Artistic Ontologies of Nature in Los Angeles, Day Two, Part Four, First Half: The October Gang say Joseph Beuys is a Stinker

     My second day in the land beyond the San Gabriel Mountains found me at The Broad Museum’s large exhibition of the works of Joseph Beuys, entitled ‘In Defense of Nature’. It was that title that first gave me the idea of writing specifically about the exhibited artistic ontologies of nature on this trip. I’ve had a soft spot for Beuys ever since I saw a retrospective of his work in (I think it was) Munich in late 1981. And in the English language context, I’ve also felt defensive about Beuys’s work and its importance in response to the astoundingly ferocious hostility to Beuys from what is usually taken to be the leading academic journal of contemporary art, October. Despite the title of the exhibition, Beuys’s works that seem to address most directly the concept of nature, above all his 7000 Oaks, do not receive any emphasis in the exhibition, which rather appears as a balanced survey of the full range and trajectory of his work, with perhaps a particular aesthetic interest in his drawings.

     Before considering Beuys’s work directly, I feel compelled to say something about October journal’s hostility, which in my experience marks every discussion of Beuys. I have addressed aspects of October’s ideologies in previous blog posts, namely Rosalind Krauss’s acclaimed essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ in relation to the philosopher Paul Crowther’s account of sculpture, and a review of the quasi-philosopher Thierry de Duve’s recent book (de Duve is only distantly connected to October, but they did publish a piece by him on Beuys). There are three prominent pieces relevant to their attack on Beuys: first and most influentially, Benjamin Buchloh’s assault from 1980 on the alleged mythic and cultic aspects of Beuys; Eric Michaud’s essay from 1988 that accuses Beuys of talking too much; and Rosalind Krauss’s short piece in her book Formless of 1993, which denounces Beuys as a kind of totalitarian meaning-maker whose conceptualizations are vastly inferior to those of her preferred Georges Bataille. None of these attacks give a careful reconstruction of Beuys’s view, none offers an overview of his work, none analyzes even one work in depth; each consists of unargued and largely evidence-free assertions, each contains controversial claims about modern art and art generally, and each contains undefended claims about what Beuys should have done if he weren’t such a stinker and bad artist.

     Here are the October gang’s central assertions about Beuys:

1. Buchloh says that Beuys’s work involves a malign self-mythologization whose historical background and pre-condition of Beuys’s work and its popularity generally is “the ahistoricity of aesthetic production and consumption of postwar Europe”. He thinks that the missing ‘historicity’ would have been some general awareness of “European Dada and Russian and Soviet Constructivism, and their political as well as their epistemological implications”; this “retarded comprehension” (!) “determined both European and American art until the late 1950s” (Buchloh, p. 42) He seems to think that Beuys’s self-mythologization is in the service of forming his own ‘cult’, and, together with Beuys’s repeated assertion that ‘Everyone is an Artist’, this is especially malign (?) because “[i]n Beuys, the cult and the myth seem to have become inseparable from the work; as his confusion of art and life is a deliberate programmatic position, an “integration” to be achieved by everybody . . .” (p. 45) Buchloh twice characterizes Beuys’s position as ‘infantile’, because it ignores psychoanalysis (?!) and involves no acknowledgement of the allegedly insuperable achievement of Marcel Duchamp and his readymades, and with it “the consequences of Duchamp’s work” (p. 46; what are these consequences?)

2. Michaud: At the beginning of his short essay Michaud states that Beuys talks too much, and at the end he insists that art should be reserved (I cannot discern how much talk is okay for Michaud; Duchamp, for example, gave a whole book worth of interviews, as well as a lecture on his work, so maybe that much is okay). Michaud’s central point seems to go as follows: the central concept for Beuys is ‘Gestaltung’ (“the putting into form”). Michaud asserts that ““this idea of Gestaltung [Michaud’s bold print], central to Beuys’s thought is the resurrection of meaning”. Michaud addresses Beuys’s interest in nature under the term ‘Beuys’s ecology’, and asserts that it “is one of Gestaltung as soil and as language”; further, this ecology “doesn't differentiate between what is given to man and what man produces: the fish, the potato, the car, and the image are all thought of as the product of human labor, the product of a culture put into good form from which the Gestaltung will be able to regenerate and expand”. For Michaud this is disastrous because “makes of every object in the world the simple instrument or means of its activity”, and that as embodied in Beuys’s central artistic conception of producing what he called ‘social sculpture’ this productive and transformative power “can, I believe, mean only the subjugation of the real world and real men, which it reduces to the mere instruments of its free exercise”. Oddly, Michaud immediately adds that Beuys’s conception “makes of activity both means and ends”.

3. Krauss: In a short section entitled ‘No to . . . Joseph Beuys’ in her book Formless Rosalind Krauss denounces Beuys for his alleged aim of making everything meaningful, or perhaps more exactly turning everything that is meaningless or non-meaningful into something that has meaning, and that this meaning is a ‘recuperation’ wherein some meaning is given to each thing by having it play some role in “the same great work” (Krauss, p. 145)  which is a “totalized system” (p. 146). In Krauss’s inimitable phrasing, “Beuys’s notion of total recuperation [is] connected to a system from which nothing escapes being impressed into the service of meaning” (ibid). Krauss seems to think this is quite a bad thing, and much prefers what she takes to be Georges Bataille’s conception of the ‘formless’, which she takes to be a dimension of artistic practice that somehow resists being turned into something ‘meaningful’.

Response: I fear that a reader (if there are any) will suspect that I am being unfair to the October theorists by presenting an under-described or distorted version of their views. I invite such a reader to invest an hour or two of her time and read the relevant pieces for herself; I am reasonably confident that a reader so informed will largely agree with my characterizations. It seems to me that the criticisms presented above are self-refuting, if for no other reason that each one demands massive further explications of all the claims, substantial defenses of controversial claims about mythology, historicization, means and ends, and meaning, and some more detailed consideration of actual works by Beuys that would show the pointedness of the criticisms. Lacking all this, one struggles to respond. One might, for example, note how close Beuys’s conceptions of agency, nature, and freedom are to those influentially propagated by Beuys’s contemporary, the dissident Rudolph Bahro, in the mid-late 1970s, and that Bahro’s subsequent abandonment of Marxist thought for a more explicitly ecological conception of human life brought him even closer to something like Beuys’s conceptions. Aside from attempting to show through nothing more than summary and quotation that the hostility to Beuys is not justified by anything resembling rational argument or artistic taste, the summaries provide one useful point for beginning an account of Beuys’s artistic ontology of nature, namely, Michaud’s hostile remark that Beuys has a conception of ecology that “doesn't differentiate between what is given to man and what man produces”. Perhaps this is right, though one might think that, following Philippe Descola’s conception briefly introduced in the first post, this is a positive feature of Beuys’s overall project. So I’ll turn to the exhibit ‘In Defense of Nature’ in the next post.

References:

Rudolph Bahro, The Alternative in Eastern Europe (1978)

--From Red to Green (1984)

Joseph Beuys, Joseph Beuys in America: Energy Plan for the Western Man (1990)

---What is Art? Conversation with Joseph Beuys (2004)

Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Beuys: The Twilight of the Idol’, in Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (2003)

Phillipe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (2005)

Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1985)

---‘No to . . . Joseph Beuys’, in Formless (1993)

Eric Michaud, ‘The Ends of Art According to Beuys’, in October 45 (1988)

Day One, Afternoon: Artistic Ontologies of Nature in Los Angeles, Part 3--Cézanne

After seeing the show of Cai Guo-Qiang’s gunpowder drawings at the USC Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, I drove a mile west (this is the Los Angeles area after all; there’s a fearsome taboo against non-car transportation) to one of my favorite museums, the Norton Simon, which contains a few works by Cézanne, including his ‘Farmhouse and Chestnut Trees at Jas de Bouffan’ (1884-85), a work that has taught me a great deal about Cézanne and artistic painting more generally. One minor surprise in Cai’s show was his long engagement with Cézanne: his initial proposal for an outdoor gunpowder drawing was for a (never realized) massive dragon-shape ascending Cézanne’s major motif, Mont St. Victoire in the late 1980s; and as recently as 2019 he hiked the mountain and reflected on its importance for Cézanne. What does Cézanne’s art mean to Cai, and how does its artistic ontology relate to Cai’s?

     As noted in my previous post, something like the concept of nature has a two-fold employment in Cai’s poetics: ‘nature’ is everything that is, and ‘nature’ is the counter-concept to humanity and the human realm; and this two-fold conception corresponds to the dual viewpoints that (so Cai urges) are embodied in his work, the view from the whole, and the human or participatory viewpoint within the whole. Cai puts this point in the Chinese idiom with the claim that his work unites the ‘inner qi’ (an impersonal energy conceptualized most fundamentally as something that flows and so characteristically imaged as a stream) of spirit with the ‘outer qi’ of form. In a catalog essay the cultural historian Simon Schama has given a somewhat breathless articulation of Cézanne’s importance to Cai; Schama writes: “Cai is fascinated by Cézanne because the French painter “looked backward and forward.” He longed for the spirit of eternality, as exemplified by masters from the past, while simultaneously thirsted to open new frontiers in art history. Cézanne looked out on his homeland and its fields and could perceive in it the essence of time and space without being tempted by the mere representation of light and shadow. In fact, Cai is fascinated by Cézanne also because he sees Cézanne’s shadow within himself.” Again as reconstructed in my previous post, Cai’s basic conceptualization of an artwork is as something that somehow contains and fuses space and time while simultaneously itself being atemporal and non-localizable. This formulation evidently demands a great deal of explication that I cannot give here, but at least part of what Cai means (a) the fusion of space and time evokes, proximally or distantly, all of space and time while neither figuring nor referring to any particular temporal moment or spatial particular, and (b) the work aims for an intelligibility not limited by social or cultural particularities. One element of Schama’s interpretation gives us a lens through which to view Cézanne: the idea that the his work presents the ‘essence’ of space and time without ‘mere’ representation of light and shadow. What might this mean?

     Consider the Norton Simon’s great later Cézanne landscape.

The painting shows a farmhouse, viewed from an oblique angle and set back at something like the far edge of the middle-distance. The farmhouse is framed on either edge by trees, on the right with just a bare, tall trunk that branches just below the top of the picture, and much more elaborately on the left by two trees, the foremost of which’s branches curve down to visually enclose the top of the house, while the more distant tree’s branches and leaves occlude the furthest edge of the building. A field stretches between the viewer and the farmhouse, with the foreground in shadow and the rest unshaded. Two features characteristic of Cézanne’s later style are particularly at a glance: the ‘uneven’ roof line which seems to bob and buckle to the point that one cannot determine its furthest point, and the mutual echoing of the slope of the roof and the hanging branches. There’s a great deal of insightful writing about Cézanne (for highlights see the ‘References’ below) from which I draw, and to my mind the beginning of wisdom on the artist starts with his statement that he wanted ‘to do Poussin according to nature’. For a quick route into this thought, consider Cézanne’s rendering of the small attached buildings to Poussin’s rendering of analogous buildings in his great ‘Landscape with a Calm’ (currently a mere 24 miles west of the Norton Simon at the Getty Center).

Note the three roof lines—the full line of the building on the far right, the whitish line furthest left that seems to run diagonally higher left-to-lower right and end in the farmhouse’s side, and beneath it the short line formed by four curved roofing tiles (?) that seems to end before the farmhouse. Each line wobbles its way, and Cézanne has rendered the far right so ambiguously that the viewer wavers between two distinct attributions of outline. These little roof lines are kindred to the great line of the farmhouse, and similarly characterized by its bends and indeterminacies. Poussin’s picture is a different world than Cézanne’s:

Yet there are many points of comparison between the two. Cézanne must have admired Poussin’s dictum ‘I have neglected nothing’, and one senses in both painters the seemingly limitless care for each detail and its place within the overall organization. However unorthodox, Cézanne shares with Poussin an adaptation and massive elaboration of Claude Lorrain’s simple schema of framing elements upon a spatial scheme of receding planes alternating light and dark. But consider Poussin’s rendering of the outbuildings:

What was ambiguity in Cézanne is paradox in Poussin. In Poussin’s work the lines are precise, but he has placed the shadow on the roof and the wall so as to suggest a fold in what would otherwise be seen as a straight line. Is the roof straight or bent? The ineliminability of this paradox seems of a piece with the peculiar rendering of the ‘galloping’ horse, which seems frozen despite the visual cues of great speed. To render Poussin according to nature means at least to relieve the style of its precision and sense of heightened visual intelligence, and to cultivate instead a sense of vision as quasi-tactual groping.

     A remark by the art historian Kurt Badt in his tremendous book The Art of Cézanne offers rapid way into Cai’s sense of Cézanne. Badt characterizes a central feature of Cézanne’s late style as ‘the dissolution of the object’. With what I’ve considered so far, this dissolution would involve at least the dissolution of the outline. Cézanne of course rejects outline as a continuous line marking the visual edges of an object, but also he rejects the idiom supremely practiced by Rembrandt of making a broken outline through a series of partially disconnected strokes. More basic to Cézanne’s late style than outline is his treatment of volume and surface by laying down a series of parallel strokes, most typically with small yet progressive changes of hue, value, or saturation across the motif, as in the rendering of the leaves in the Norton Simon’s landscape painting:

Then Cézanne either omits the visible outline entirely, or, as with the roof lines, deviates from linearity and inflects it in such a way that it seems responsive to the visible and invisible contextual features of its surrounding objects and atmosphere, the pressure of Cézanne’s hand, and the unrecoverable shifts in ocular focus and exact placement of his head.

     A second central feature of Cézanne’s late style is the strong tendency to collapse, at least partially, ordered recession in space in favor of heightened communication between foreground, middleground, and background elements. This is especially prominent here in the visual closeness of the branches and the farmhouse’s roof.

 This intimacy of foreground and background typical of Cézanne serves a range of pictorial functions, including binding the pictorial elements and motifs together more tightly than was possible in previous styles of composition, further to set up rhythms and counter-rhythms, echoes and responses, concords and dissonances, all the while breaking the sense (common in works rendered in linear perspective) of a continuous space subtending the pictorial world and the physical location of the viewer. Despite their continuous appeal to tactility and embodiment, Cézanne’s later works insist on the sense that the pictorial world is a kind of self-contained realm at an unbridgeable distance from the viewer. The very rendering of surface and volume in series of rectangular patches invokes a micro-ordering responsive to the macro-orders of foreground/middleground/background and the physical rectangularity of the canvas itself.

     So one might say that in ‘doing Poussin according to nature’, Cézanne relives Poussin of his well-ordered space, his learnedness, his mythological subject-matter, and his acute sense of visual paradox in favor of a ‘nature’ that is a groping and fundamentally embodied kind of vision amidst a fundamentally other world of durable yet constantly changing objects. Perhaps this is enough for Cai to see Cézanne’s shadow in himself. But Cai’s work, and its motivating ideology of embodying two-fold qi, that is qi as a dynamic whole and qi as the opposing and interacting forces of the inner and the outer, rejects something that is still basic for Cézanne, the sheer thereness and materiality of the world.

     In my next post, I’ll consider my final foray into the artistic ontologies of nature in Los Angeles with an account of Joseph Beuy’s conceptions of nature as evidenced in the retrospective entitled ‘In Defense of Nature’.

References:

Kurt Badt, The Art of Cézanne (1965)

Roger Fry, Cézanne: A Study of his Development (1927)

Lawrence Gowing, ‘The Logic of Organized Sensations’, in Cézanne: The Late Work (1977), ed. William Rubin

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’, in Sense and Non-Sense (1964)

Fritz Novotny, ‘The Late Landscape Paintings’, in Cézanne: The Late Work (1977), ed. William Rubin

--‘Cézanne and the End of Scientific Perspective’, in The Vienna School Reader (2000), ed. Christopher Wood

Simon Schama (ed.), Cai Guo-Qiang: Odyssey and Homecoming (2021)

Meyer Schapiro, Paul Cézanne (1952)

Day One, Late Morning: Cai Guo-Qiang’s Artistic Ontology of Nature in Pasadena

My first morning in the parched Southlands finds me in Pasadena at the delightful USC Pacific Asia Museum for the exhibition of one of my favorite living artists, Cai Guo-Qiang. The show surveys chronologically Cai’s trajectory of using gunpowder in drawings, from his first thorough-going works when he lived and studied in Japan in 1986, through his large works made (or intended to be made) outdoors in the late 1980s, then continuing to the present with recent uses of integrating AI and robots into their conceptualization and making. The exhibition lacks the very large pieces for which he is best known (of course along with his stupefying fireworks), and so has perhaps more the feel of a well-curated documentation of his career than of a major artistic event. And even a large museum retrospective of Cai’s work would seem not fully representative, as his works include drawings, paintings, sculptures,  installations, the quasi-performative events of the making of his gunpowder works, fireworks displays, and other hard-to-categorize hybrid constructions.  Still, any exhibition of a few dozen works by this great artist is of keen interest to us art lovers, and I seize the opportunity to begin to reconstruct and consider the artistic ontology motivating and/or embodied in his art.

    Over the past 35 years Cai has released quite a number of writings and interviews wherein he has stated and re-stated his basic conception of art. Although I note the philosopher of art Richard Wollheim’s wise observation that with artists one ought to use their works to interpret their writings, rather than using their writings to interpret their work, Cai is a visual artist-thinker in the manner of William Kentridge, one who is outstandingly reflective, clairvoyant, and articulate, to permit starting with his words. At its most general, Cai’s philosophical orientation is Daoist; as he puts it with a characteristic indifference to the alleged distinction between facts and norms: “Human beings should echo the rhythm of the Universe. If you fail, you should accept it. If you are tired, you should rest. Its basic principles are the laws we must follow in doing anything. Human beings must understand nature and go by its rules. You cannot change nature, and everything must follow it. Life must respond to its rhythm.” (Cai, quoted in Cai (2016)) With suitable substitutions, his doctrine here seems close to Stoic ethics, as stated for example by Diogenes Laertius: “Therefore, living in agreement with nature comes to be the end, which is in accordance with the nature of oneself and that of the whole, engaging in no activity wont to be forbidden by the universal law, which is the right reason pervading everything and identical to Zeus, who is this director of the administration of existing things.”

Cai ties the making of gunpowder drawings in a statement from the mid-1990s: “In the past few years, I have mainly worked from two concepts: the first is from the perspective of the universe and the second is the interaction and dialogue between humanity and the universe. I mainly use gunpowder to convey my concepts because I hope to allow the explosion of my work to be assimilated into the movement of the universe” (p. 73). This statement of the two perspectives Cai attempts to construct is extraordinarily illuminating, as we shall see, in helping to explicate the distinctiveness, and the distinctive artistic power, of the gunpowder drawings.

Cai gives his basic artistic aim, and one that is realized in his oeuvre with especial vividness, as realizing within an instant a fusion of time and space (this is some evidence for Wollheim’s dictum; plainly the nature of this attempted fusion needs explication from Cai’s actual works). In an interview Cai has said that starting with his gunpowder works in the late 1980s “the idea was to transcend time and space. And starting then, art became a time-space tunnel for me. I was able to travel freely between East and West, the past and the present, in and out of government systems, and the visible and invisible worlds . . . My works are like time-space continuums that link imagination and the inner child among people from different cultures.” (Cai (2012), p. 77)

In his remarks on his gunpowder drawings Cai repeatedly states that his proximal aim is to make invisible forces visible. How this works in relation to Cai’s invocation of a two-fold perspective in the drawings is suggested in his remark that “For me, the allure of gunpowder lies in its uncontrollability and spontaneity; as with destiny itself, much of the creation is pure luck. Therefore, behind the artwork, another artist or force seems to be at work. Even more significant is the sensation I feel when I come in contact with the gunpowder; the moment of explosion feels like a direct dialogue with a source of invisible energy.” (Cai (2012), p. 77). The first point places the work in the cosmological perspective itself, the second the relation between human and cosmos. A final important mark of his drawings arises from Cai’s distinction between his paintings and his drawings: “Simply put, the distinction between my “paintings” and “drawings” lies in their purpose. If I made something for the sake of my installations, especially for the outdoor explosions projects, then it is a drawing; otherwise, it is a painting.” (Cai (2016), p. 134)

     Let’s turn to the drawings themselves. Again, the works at this exhibition are perhaps not most representative of Cai’s gunpowder drawings, which with their large size and multiple foci carry on their face more of an environmental and collaborative character. Consider the recent small piece ‘Study for Cosmos No. 1’ (2018).

This study displays his only recent use of colored gunpowder; for much of career he had limited himself to black gunpowder with the thought that black contains all other colors. Prominent here and throughout the gunpowder drawings is the basic feature of gunpowder’s explosiveness, whose visual after-effect is invariably of some smallish center from which radiates clouds and strands with decreasing saturation. Here and elsewhere an especially concentrated deposit of gunpowder tears a hole in the support, usually paper or canvas, but also rarely of silk. Whatever range of resonances arise from the explosive marks, the effect is first of all invariably floral, and so the hole maintains a pictorial function as the sepal or ovary. The invisible becomes visible as the flower gives expression to the nutritive and reproductive forces in plants, and orients itself to the spectator as the flower does to the pollinator.

     One way to bring out the specificity of Cai’s ontology is through contrast with its spiritual and artistic contemporary, the prints that the composer John Cage made towards the end of his life. For both Cai and Cage part of their secondary motivations were the elimination, defusion, and/or transformation of the thought of violence within artistic creation. By 1950 Cage had come to conceive of his artwork as setting up a circumscribed spatio-temporal ‘space’ or ‘place’ wherein things could show up as they are, undistorted by the tastes or prejudices of the artist. When he starting regularly making prints in the 1980s this conception collapsed, as Cage began to notice that there was no way of evading his own tastes and preferences. Either his life’s work had been based upon a misconception, or the role of violence within artistic creation had to be reconceptualized. Cage then began with ‘distressing’ the support—burying, staining, and/or burning the paper. The paper was then ‘branded’ with simple shapes or forms chosen by Cage, but whose placement and intensity were determined by chance. Here is Cage’s ‘EninKa #28’ of 1986:

The effect was to create a kind of ontological equivalence between support and non-support, mark and hole, forces as it were arising from the interior of the paper and forces exerted upon the paper. Equivalence reigns. Cai’s way, seemingly so similar and similarly motivated, differs absolutely. For Cai the ineliminable floral character of the marks carries the botanical structure of root, stem, and flower with its own internal structure. The blossoming is instantaneous, and only so can it evoke the concentrated fusion of spatial and temporal dimensions. In one way, Cai’s work is vastly more capacious than Cage’s, in that it contains an indefinitely large social dimension of collaborators and viewers via the second of its two-fold character. Cage restricts himself to the first of Cai’s dimensions, the point of view of the universe, and it is this that gives it its profundity, but also something of its impersonality. Cage’s is a world indifferent to us, the result of a personality aiming to extinguish itself, and one for each person as no one and everyone. Cai’s ontology is processual and ineliminably heterogenous.

     I’ll try to make something more of this cryptic analysis in my next post, where I encounter Cézanne at the Norton Simon and begin with reflections on Cai’s own stated engagement with the great French painter of nature.

References:

Cai Guo-Qiang, Cai Guo-Qiang: Ladder to the Sky (2012)

--Cai Guo-Qiang: My Stories of Painting (2016)

Day One, Morning: Some Artistic Ontologies of Nature in Los Angeles

Nothing says ‘Los Angeles’ like cars, celebrity worship, and aversion to urban pedestrianism, and one might with reason think that nothing says ‘Los Angeles’ less than the word ‘Nature’.

But perhaps something more is afoot than what history will probably refer to as ‘the orange coup’. Today I begin my short stay in the land beyond the San Gabriel Mountains, a trip demanded by the temporary presence of Velázquez’s ‘Queen Mariana of Austria’ (1652-53) at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. As great luck would have it, there are also now major shows up by two of my Top 50 artists of the past 50 years, Joseph Beuys and Cai Guo-Qiang. By further chance, both of the latter exhibitions highlight the artists’ conceptions of nature: Beuy’s show is called ‘In Defense of Nature’, and another museum in Pasadena has a large show of Cai’s profound gunpowder drawings, which give powerful expression to his Daoist conception of nature. To the mind that is warped by the love of art and woofed by philosophy, this suggests a series of very short blog posts reflecting upon the differing conceptions of nature embodied in the works of Beuys, Cai, and also Cézanne at the Norton Simon.

    We can take our orientation from four major conceptions of nature. First, there is the magnificent conception introduced and articulated by Anaximander over 2500 years ago, the conception of nature as ‘cosmos’. Anaximander’s great and sole fragment characterizes ‘the unlimited’, and (rendered very loosely by me from memory) goes: ‘From where things arise, there also they are destroyed, according to necessity; for they have to pay the penalty for their injustice, according to the ordering of time.’ So Anaximander suggests a beautiful (‘cosmos’ has the same root as ‘cosmetics’) and just order wherein elements or items have determinate, non-contingent (‘necessary’), and especially temporal relations with each other. ‘Nature’ would then carry a kind of ambiguity as either a synonym for ‘cosmos’, or as part of an opposition (nature (phusis) vs. convention (humanity/culture/etc. as nomos) within the cosmos. A second conception would be nature as resources for humanity; on such a conception one might wish to speed up global warming so as to rendering more quickly accessible the mineral resources of what has been traditionally known as ‘Greenland’. A third conception is what is perhaps the most durable one embodied in post-Renaissance European, and given its emblematic form in the many, many works of Claude Lorrain: nature is a well-ordered, beautiful, docile realm at a distance yet fully available for human delectation.

A fourth and final conception is not conception at all, as in the recent influential works of the French anthropologist Phillipe Descola, who forcefully argues for that the very idea of ‘nature’ as opposed to ‘culture’ is an invidious Western conception used among other things in anthropology to misunderstand and indeed mutilate non-Western conceptions of both human life and the natural world.

     Where do the artists of Los Angeles stand in relation to these conceptions? I’ll address this daily for the next few days with short posts on Cai, Cézanne, and Beuys.

Print Resources for the forthcoming posts:

Kurt Badt, The Art of Cézanne (1985)

John Foster Bellamy, Capitalism in the Anthropocene

Joseph Beuys, What is Art?: Conversation with Joseph Beuys (2004)

Henry Bugbee, ‘The Idea of Wilderness’

Cai Guo-Qiang, Cai Guo-Qiang: Ladder to the Sky (2012)

--Cai Guo-Qiang: my stories of painting (2016)

Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (2013)

Charles Kahn, Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology (1960)

The World in an Eye, First Draft #10b: Vision Itself

I turn now to the final part of my sketch of the great resources of artistic meaning in the visual arts with a sketch of the aspects of visual perception itself that are regularly recruited into visual artworks. As noted in my previous post, there are traditionally different major classifications of the arts, including the temporal and spatial arts, and (presupposing the restriction of the arts primarily to the distal senses) the visual arts and the arts of hearing, with the latter distinction usually supplemented with further categories or sub-categories such as the performative and linguistic arts. There is no reason, I think, to hesitate about choosing between ‘spatial arts’ and ‘visual arts’ as one’s orienting classification, both because of the sense of vision as providing our primary perception of distance, and because accordingly the two come to much the same thing in actual analyses of artistic meaning. Further, and perhaps surprisingly, little need be said here about general features of visual perception, as the construction of artistic meaning in visual artworks arises, as we shall see, more from the recruitment of particular structures of the visual field (such as center-periphery, foreground-background, primary/secondary/tertiary foci, and ‘seeing-in’ (again, the capacity to see something in a marked surface) than from the background conditions provided by vision as such.

     For our specific purposes, the account of the basic features of vision provided by the philosopher Hans Jonas will serve. In his essay ‘The Nobility of Sight: A Study in the Phenomenology of the Senses’ Jonas gives three basic characteristics of vision, as follows: “The unique distinction of sight consists in what we may provisionally call the image-performance, where “image” implies these three characteristics: (1) simultaneity of the presentation of a manifold, (2) neutralization of the causality of sense-affection, (3) distance in the spatial and mental senses.” (Jonas, p. 136) Jonas explicates these points as follows: (1’) Sight offers a sense of the simultaneous in that it grasps “many things juxtaposed, as co-existent parts of one field of vision.” This is not to say of course that everything within a particular view is ever simultaneously in focus or the object of focal attention (Jonas neglects this point with regard to simultaneity, but introduces it in the discussion of distance, and it will be central to my later account of the structure of the visual field), but that in contrast the other senses, especially hearing and touch, insofar as they offer access to a structured field do so by synthesizing a perceptual unity “out of a temporal sequence of sensations which are themselves time-bound and spatial” (ibid). (2’) Jonas claims that in contrast to the other senses sight distinctively lacks any causal relation or interaction between the perceiver and the object of perception: In vision “I have to do nothing but to look, and the object is not affected by that: and once there is light, the object has only to be there to be visible, and I am not affected by that: and yet it is apprehended in its self-containment from out of my own self-containment, it is present to me without drawing me into its presence.” (p. 146) (3’) Jonas considers the sense of distance to be the most fundamental aspect of sight, as neither simultaneity nor neutralization would be possible if the contents of the visual field were all in the viewer’s immediate proximity (p. 149). Sight requires distance in its very operation, in that a close view may gain distinctness of an object’s detail, but loses the comprehensiveness and integration within a visual field characteristic of vision. Jonas adds a point that was, as we have seen, extensively discussed by Husserl and especially Merleau-Ponty, that is, that everything within the visual field contains a sense of a horizon, of some further possibility of vision that is not yet available: in the visual field there is a “continuous blending of the focused area into more and more distant background-planes, and its shading off toward the fringes, which make the “and so on” more than an empty potentiality: there is the co-represented readiness of the field to be penetrated, a positive pull which draws the glance on as the given content passes as it were of itself over into further contents.” (p. 151) My summary is restricted by its role in my overall project, but I must note that it omits something central to the essay, namely that in all his characterizations and explications, Jonas further suggests that each aspect of vision is bound to very basic metaphysical stances and conceptions; he summarizes these with: “Simultaneity of presentation furnishes the idea of enduring present, the contrast between change and the unchanging, between time and eternity. Dynamic neutralization furnishes form as distinct from matter, essence as distinct from existence, and the difference of theory and practice. Distance furnishes the idea of infinity.” (p. 152)

     There is of course a great deal more that could be said about vision (I have been particularly helped by recent writings of James J. Gibson, Brian O’Shaughnessy, Mohan Matthen, and Alva Noë cited in the ‘References and Works Consulted’ below), but the basic points made by Jonas will prove to be sufficient for this stage of the inquiry (again, much more about the structure of the visual field as recruited into artworks will be discussed). To close this sketch of the largest reserves for artistic meaningfulness in visual artworks—the body; gesture; the hand; language; vision—I’ll indicate in the form of slogans the most general ways in which these resources are recruited into artworks. The slogans are ‘Constrain Thyself!’ and ‘All Constraint is (potentially) Expansion!’ What?? What do these slogans mean??

     My conception motivating these slogans arises in response from two unlikely sources: the social philosopher Jon Elster’s account of aesthetic value, and the philosopher of sport Bernard Suit’s path-breaking proposals for and analyses of the nature of games. Elster is a prolific writer who has focused in part on investigating and attempting to explain puzzling kinds of seemingly irrational behavior and thought. He devoted sections of two books from the early-mid 1980s to explain aesthetic value. He approaches the issue with the claim that “artistic creation involves maximization under constraints, and that good works of art are local maxima of whatever it is that artists are maximizing” (Elster (1983), p. 78) The term ‘constraint’ in the context of artistic creation signifies anything and everything to which the artist limits herself (in essence pragmatically declaring “I shall do and use this, this, and this, but not that, that, and that; for example “I shall use this kind of paper with this kind of pen and this kind of ink and draw in Rembrandt’s manner without solid outlines” etc.) Elster notes that constraints “arise from the embrace of a technique, which in turn involves the exercise of substantive constraints particular to a tradition, as well as from various technical, physical, or administrative limitations.” (pp. 79-80) As he puts it in the later book, artistic creation on this conception is a two-step process of choosing constraints and then making choices within constraints (Elster (1984), p. 200n). ‘Choice’ in this context is of course not arbitrary, both in that the artist typically works within traditions that supply constraints, and such constraints in turn guide ‘choices’ in style, subject-matter, rhetoric, etc. that are in much of the world’s art highly determined by social conditions of patronage and reception. But the point is that without such constraints aesthetic value cannot arise. (I cannot here address Elster’s arguments for this claim, which I accept in ways perhaps more qualified than Elster’s). In a loosely similar way, Bernard Suits has proposed and argued for a conception of games as playing under conditions where the participants make a “voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”. Putting more formally, he writes: “To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude]. ‘’ (Suits, p. 41) There is of course an enormous amount that requires reflection and explication here, but the most general point shared by Elster and Suits in this context is that maximally achieving certain kinds of aims requires the acceptance of certain constraints. The rest of this book can be seen as a partial attempt to explicate this thought in the context of the visual arts.

     With that, which cannot be more than a hint and a promise, I turn next to the great resources and structures of distinctively visual art, which shall include spatial metaphor, seeing-in and inflection of marked surfaces generally, the structuring of the visual field, and ornamentation. In my next post I’ll present and offer critical reflections upon the major account that seems to me close to, but importantly different than, the account I’m developing here, namely the account of the basic forms and kinds of meaning in spatial arts offered by the art historian David Summers in his magisterial book Real Spaces, with its treatment of the great Olmec heads as the paradigm of spatial artworks.

 References and Works Consulted:

Tyler Burge, Perception: First Form of Mind (2022)

Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the subversion of rationality (1983)

--Ulysses and the Sirens (1984)

James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1986)

Edmund Husserl, Ideas II (1913)

Hans Jonas, ‘The Nobility of Sight: A Study in the Phenomenology of the Senses’, in The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (1966)

Mohan Matthen, ‘Active Perception and the Representation of Space’, in Perception and Its Modalities (2015), ed. Dustin Stokes, Mohan Matthen, and Stephen Biggs

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (1945)

Alva Noë, Action in Perception (2004)

--Varieties of Presence (2012)

Brian O’Shaughnessy, On Consciousness and the World (2002)

Michael Podro, Depiction (1998)

Dustin Stokes and Stephen Biggs, ‘The Dominance of the Visual’, in Perception and Its Modalities (2015), ed. Dustin Stokes, Mohan Matthen, and Stephen Biggs

Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia (1978)

David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (2003)

Sculpture comes to the Bay Area: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s ‘Point of Infinity’

We Bay Area art lovers subsist for the most part on the thinnest of aesthetic gruel, doled out daily by the braying identitarians and performative virtue-signalers heading the local museums, arts centers, and scholastic art departments. So Hiroshi Sugimoto’s ‘Point of Infinity’, a new 69-foot-high sculpture installed in a park atop Yerba Buena Island, offers a kind of artistic intelligence and cultural ambition that we rare experience locally. I saw the work up-close for the first time yesterday (it’s visible from the Bay Bridge as you drive towards San Francisco), and thought it more than significant enough to ponder in a short blog piece.

     Sugimoto emerged in the early 1980s with striking photographs of movies screens created by the still camera with an open lens registering the showing of an entire film. Consequently the screens showed a great radiance of undifferentiated white light, a luminescent cloud that is understood to contain all the film’s frames while exhibiting none. Later series of long-exposures took as their subjects seascapes, dioramas, and wax figures. In every case the impression is of a kind of refined intelligence, both conceptual and visual, producing a visual paradox expressive of sublimity: life as death as life; stillness of motion in stillness; physicality as ideality made physical. In the early part of this century Sugimoto first saw and was inspired by a series of photographs from the mid-1930s by Man Ray that showed in dramatic black-and-white physical models of mathematical equations.

In interviews Sugimoto has repeatedly stated his conception of his artworks as models that condensed and expressed space and time, each through the other. The photograph of a mathematical model is for Sugimoto a kind of third-order object, a model of a model of an equation, and one expressive of the formula-derived orderings of mathematics, geometry, and topology. The range of application of such formulae is indeterminately vast in a way that rhymes with the ontological placelessness of the individual photograph; both are models ready for placement and application.

     Sugimoto began making his own mathematically-derived physical models and photographing  them. At roughly the same time he began collaborating on architectural projects.

Sugimoto has described an early commission: “For the entrance of Oak Omotesando, a mixed-use building in Tokyo, the brief from the client was “to transform the whole space into a work of art. We began by creating a six-meter-high mathematical model—a three-dimensional expression of the formula of a cubic function—and suspending it from the nine-meter-high ceiling. Known as “surface of revolution with constant negative curvature,” the cubic function creates hyperbolic curves; the point where these curves finally intersect is infinity. This model was created as a visualization of the point of infinity. It is, however, impossible to physically make that point. . . I imagine the curves pass through the center of the earth and emerge in Brazil at a width of a few microns before finally crossing at the point of infinity somewhere in the outer reaches of the universe.” (Sugimoto and Sakakida, p. 57) --Sugimoto’s construction irresistibly recalls the pillars in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax building, though I can see or find nothing that suggests that the visual allusion is intentional:

     Sugimoto is unwavering in his conceptualizations: he understands his works as third-order models that present sublime condensations of space and time, and ‘Points of Infinity’ sustains all these marks. The sculpture is evidently a monumentalization of the doorway’s mathematical model, rotated 180 degrees so that the ceiling attachment becomes the supporting base.

The sculpture rises 69 feet, with the lower part made of an unfortunate fiberglass (a chunk has already been broken off, likely by one of the hoodlums and/or selfie-taking narcissists who infest the Bay Area) and the upper part made of stainless steel whose tip is less than one inch wide. Though placed high near the top of Yerba Buena Island, at a distance of say the Bay Bridge it resembles a tiny church spire dwarfed by the hodge-podge of downtown San Francisco’s grotesque high-rises a couple of miles away. Sugimoto has said that the sculpture will function as a sundial, with stones marking the exact spots of the sun’s shadows at noon on the equinoxes.

     To my mind the most intriguing aspect of ‘Points of Infinity’ is the revealing way in which it invites comparisons with humanity’s earliest monuments of the Neolithic and also with the great cosmic architectural conceptualizations of the early civilizations of India, China, and Central and South America. The conceptualization of monoliths and apertures as markers of celestial events is of course a prominent feature of many Neolithic structures, most famously at Stonehenge and Newgrange. But Sugimoto’s remark about imagining the curves of his earlier work passing through the center of the earth invites comparison with the widely attested concept of the axis mundi, the center of the earth and center of the cosmos that serves as the basis of physical and spiritual orientation and about which everything that is arrays itself and turns. As Paul Wheatley put it in his canonical account of the organization of early Chinese cities, the city bears a ‘centripetalizing symbolism’ that gathers and gives expression to basic cosmic elements: “In the Chou-Li it is explained how the [relevant] official . . . calculated the precise position of this axis mundi (ti-chung), which is there characterized as ‘the place where earth and sky meet, where the four seasons merge, where wind and rain are gathered in, and where ying and yang are in harmony’.” (Wheatley, p. 428) Looking up from the base of ‘Points of Infinity’ gives a vivid sense of the meeting of earth and sky. ‘Points of Infinity’ joins Nancy Holt’s ‘Sun Tunnels’ and Robert Smithson’s ‘Spiral Jetty’ as an instance of the little-populated sub-genre of cosmic Minimalism.

References and Works Consulted:

Kerry Brougher and Pia Müller-Tamm, Hiroshi Sugimoto (2010)

Titus Burckhardt, Sacred Art in East and West (1967)

George Michell, Hindu Art and Architecture (2000)

Klaus Ottmann, Hiroshi Sugimoto: Conceptual Forms and Mathematical Models (2015)

Hiroshi Sugimoto and Tomoyuki Sakakida, Old is New: Architectural Works by New Material Research Laboratory (2021)

Paul Wheatley, Pivot of the Four Quarters: A Preliminary Enquiry into the Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City (1971)

The World in an Eye, First Draft #10a: Prolegomena to Vision as an Artistic Resource

I turn now to my final sketch of the great resources of artistic meaningfulness in the visual arts, vision itself. As with my previous accounts, this explication is highly partial and oriented to introducing the basic aspects of vision that are regularly recruited into meaning in visual artworks. First, I’ll offer some suggestions as to why one might so much as want a theory of the visual arts. Then I’ll sketch Aristotle’s immensely influential hylomorphic account of vision, and very briefly indicate something of the history in Western philosophy of attempts to make sense of vision.

On an idealizing schema with a traditional slant, one might think that there is a three-tiered and nested conceptualization of artworks. The broadest concept is art, one that collects the world’s paintings, drawings, sculptures, music, theater, and poetry, and on some accounts also dance, photography, film, and perhaps even comics. Below the category of art is a great division into types of artforms. One major example is the opposition of spatial arts and temporal arts, a division that contrasts ontological kinds of artworks. Francis Sparshott gives a modern statement of this in distinguishing “works of the “time” arts, whose design depends on being taken in a certain temporal order and with a certain temporal patterning, and the works of the “space” arts, whose design depends on spatial relations that are presented simultaneously and can be grasped all at once or in any order” (Sparshott, p. 181). The other prominent such division assumes that artworks are made to be perceived by the distal senses of hearing and vision, and not the contact senses of taste, smell, and touch, and divides the arts into those that address the eye, and those that address the ear. On these traditional schemas, the visual arts are those that address the eye or the spatial arts. And indeed, in the most prominent canonical explication of these great divisions, the Laocoön of the mid-18th century by the German philosopher, theologian, and playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, these two ways kinds of division come to much the same thing. Lessing contrasts poetry and painting as arts of succession and simultaneity, and explicitly says that by ‘painting’ he means the visual arts generally, and will explicate the conception of the temporal arts with references to poetry and also other artforms.  where spatial arts are those wherein the artwork is wholly present (though not necessarily wholly available) at any given moment, as are paintings, drawings, and sculptures, and temporal arts, which necessarily unfold in time, such as music and theater. Below the great division are the various artforms of painting, drawing, etc.

     Every major aspect of the conceptualization of artworks has undergone critical and often skeptical attention. With regard to the mid-tier of the categorical distinctions between temporal and spatial arts or between arts of the ‘eye’ and those of the ‘ear’, John Dewey made a series of fundamental criticisms. First, Dewey notes that in the arts “[r]igid classifications are inept (if they are taken seriously) because they distract attention from that which is esthetically basic—the qualitatively unique and integral character of experience of an art product. Second, such distinctions are inevitably misleading or confusing in that they “neglect transitional and connecting links” between and among different kinds of arts, and so “put insuperable obstacles in the way of an intelligent following of the historical development of any art”. Third, and most importantly for the attempt to construct and analyze the concept of visual art, the attempt to isolate a single sense organ as determining the range and content of any artform misses the fact “that a particular sense is simply the outpost of a total organic activity in which all organs, including the functioning of the autonomic system, participate. Eye, ear, touch, take the lead in a particular organic enterprise, but they are no more the exclusive or even always the most important agent than a sentinel is a whole army.”  And fourth, the attempt to class arts as spatial or temporal is unilluminating, in that it “throws no light upon the esthetic content of any work of art”, screens from view the formal and structural characteristics of art such as rhythm in architecture, sculpture, and painting, or symmetry in song, poetry, or eloquence. and so misses the fundamentally perceptual nature of esthetic experience. (Dewey, pp. 217-18)

     There is much to agree with in Dewey’s criticisms, but none of them, so it seems to me, undermines the motivation or coherence of the philosophical exploration of distinctively artistic meaning in the visual arts. Dewey’s points about the embodied nature of perception and the interrelations among the individual senses is fundamental to this philosophical exploration as I conceive it, and will, as we shall first see shortly, is indeed inconceivable without such embodied interrelations. And nothing in the investigation predisposes or requires us to employ classifications rigidly, and our adoption of Podro’s account of artistic meaning as sustaining recognition treats attention to the content (that is, what is recognized) as basic and ineliminable.

     What, then, is vision conceptualized as resource of meaningfulness in the visual arts? I limit myself here to major works in the Western philosophical tradition. The canonical beginning of the philosophical consideration of vision is in Aristotle’s De Anima, 2.7 418a26-419b4. In 2.5-6 Aristotle gives a hylomorphic account of perception whereby a suitably receptive organ receives a form from a percept or object of sense [aisthēton], the organ takes on that form, and the subject and its perceiving organ thereby becomes isomorphic with what is perceived (418a5-6). So the perceiving subject and its sense organ is potentially what the object of sense is actually. After a discussion of the ‘common objects’ of perception, that is, those that are not exclusive to one sense including “motion, rest, number, shape, and magnitude” (418a17-18), Aristotle turns to the five senses considered individually in order to specify for each how the account works. Vision requires three features distinct from the suitably receptive perceiver. The objects of vision must be be distant from, that is, not in physical contact with, the perceiver; they must possess some color; and there must be a medium connecting perceiver and object of perception. Aristotle then turns to the other senses and considers them with the template provided by his analysis of vision. These very basic features of Aristotle’s account—vision as a distal sense; color as distinctive of and indeed ineliminable from vision; the need for some continuous medium connecting viewer and viewed; modelling the senses upon an initial treatment of vision—all become durable and fundamental features of philosophical accounts of vision.

     I’ll conclude this introductory post with the briefest possible sketch of later monuments in Western philosophy of vision. Perhaps the greatest stimulus to the philosophy of vision was the question famously posed by the Irish writer William Molyneux to the philosopher John Locke in the second half of the 17th century: If a blind person who could recognize cubes and spheres by touch were to suddenly become sighted, would he be able to recognize those geometric forms solely through visual perception? The question received widely varying answers from many philosophers, and interest in it was revived forty years ago with the publication of an essay on it by the philosopher Gareth Evans. The other major recent stimulus to the philosophy of vision in English was an earlier essay from 1962 by the philosopher Paul Grice. Both these articles are immensely rich and densely argued, so I cannot even begin to summarize them here; but their combined stimuli has evidently been to direct philosophical attention to the questions surrounding the individuation of the senses, both whether and how one sense differs from other; and also whether the senses as traditionally conceived (vision, hearing, etc.) are rightly thought of as single senses. With regard to vision, the question has arisen, stimulated in particular by research in cognitive science, whether human beings have two systems of visual perception.

     In my next post, I’ll make passing reference to some of this recent work in cognitive science and philosophy, but my points about vision as a resource for artistic meaningfulness will for the most part be given through consideration of an essay from 1953 by the philosopher Hans Jonas. I’ll then sketch something of the relevant points about the structure of the visual field, and finally announce my fundamental principle of artistic meaningfulness.

References and Works Consulted:

Aristotle, Aristotle: De Anima (2016), translated with commentary by Christopher Shields

---De Sensu

John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934)

Gareth Evans, ‘Molyneux’s Question’, in Collected Papers (1985)

Paul Grice, “Some remarks about the senses” (1962), in Studies in the Ways of Words (2002)

Hans Jonas, ‘The Nobility of Sight: A Study in the Phenomenology of the Senses’, in The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (1966)

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön (1766)

Mohan Matthen, ‘Active Perception and the Representation of Space’, in Perception and Its Modalities (2015), ed. Dustin Stokes, Mohan Matthen, and Stephen Biggs

Brian O’Shaughnessy, On Consciousness and the World (2002)

Michael Podro, Depiction (1998)

Ronald Polansky, Aristotle’s De anima (2007)

Francis Sparshott, The Theory of the Arts (1982)

Dustin Stokes and Stephen Biggs, ‘The Dominance of the Visual’, in Perception and Its Modalities (2015), ed. Dustin Stokes, Mohan Matthen, and Stephen Biggs

The World in an Eye, First Draft #9b: Textual Meaning in Nicholas Poussin and Hamish Fulton

In my last general consideration of the great resources of meaningfulness in the visual arts, I turn now to language. The topic is perhaps even more vast and complex than my previously considered resources of embodiment, gesture, and artifactuality; but as before I limit myself to introductory points that are directly relevant to considering the recruitment of language into visual arts and their distinctively artistic meanings. Even so, I don’t think the topic admits of summary treatment, and so discussions of particular work later in the book will add points without pretending to give an exhaustive account. By way of introduction I’ll consider a series of what I take to be fundamental points. First, I’ll sketch what seems to me the best account of something like a standard understanding of the contribution of language to visual artworks with Richard Wollheim’s analysis of the ‘way of textuality’ in paintings. Then I’ll consider the artist Hamish Fulton’s piece ‘Rock Fall Echo Dust’  in light of two major theoretical considerations of very basic aspects of language that can be recruited into distinctively visual artistic meaningfulness: the revolutionary account of the ineliminable quasi-metaphoric activity of language use in the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein as analyzed by Hans Julius Schneider; and the account of the effects of repetition in language as analyzed by Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson.

     In Painting as an Art Richard Wollheim offers a path-breaking analysis of how painters make language part of the artistic content of their works with a survey of works of Nicholas Poussin. On a standard art historical understanding language enters the content of an artistic painting if and when circumstances bring some bit of language to bear upon the subject-matter and/or its manner of presentation. So, on the example Wollheim cites, some doctrine of Stoicism is part of the content of a painting by Poussin when (a) documentation shows Poussin interested in and advocating some bit of Stoicism and (b) some of Poussin’s subject-matter—an antique setting, a particular figure related to the Stoics, some gesture expressive of an attitude commended in Stoicism, etc.—is shown in the work. Wollheim rejects this as too permissive and recommends more stringent criteria for language entering the content of a painting. He starts from the idea that language in the relevant sense is a ‘text’, and that a text “is something propositional: furthermore it is something propositional that has, and is partially identified by reference to, a history. Examples of a text as I think of it would be a religious doctrine, a proverb, a cosmological theory, a moral principle, a metaphor, a world-view.” (Wollheim, p. 187) Now, for a text to be part of the content of an artistic painting must mean minimally that its presence must alter an appropriately attuned viewer’s experience of the painting, that is, the viewer’s experience of a painting with textual content must be different than, indeed richer, than the experience of an otherwise visually indiscernible painting that lacked that content. Wollheim then places an especially stringent stricture upon the manner of such alteration by stipulating that “a text enters the content of a painting on if, in representing some event that is connected with that text, the painting also reveals what the text means to the artist” (p. 188). Wollheim offers a lengthy virtuoso demonstration of his views that cannot be briefly summarized, but consider his central example of Poussin’s ‘The Ashes of Phocion collected by his Widow’ (1648):

Wollheim here and elsewhere draws attention to Poussin’s manner of depicting nature: “in the background . . . undomesticated nature reasserts itself, and the shaft of a mountain thrusts upwards from out of the thick curly forest that clings to its root. It disrupts the life of the city . . . An air of untamed mystery attaches to the mountain, and this is intensified by its irrational shape, which its silhouette does not reveal” (p. 215). “This mystery is then taken up in the foreground by the unexplained breeze which sways the massive ilexes . . . The wind causes the foliage to rise and fall, so that each clump of leaves is an elusive variation upon a common form” (p. 218). While the foreground shows the heroic act of the widow collecting Phocion’s ashes (Phocion had been unjustly executed for treason and denied burial within the city), Poussin’s association of the elemental forces linking the foreground trees with the background mountain shows the source of the energy of the widow’s ‘transcendent act of probity’: “it comes from the natural stirrings of instinct” (p. 220). So for Wollheim it is not that the painting bears textual meaning because Poussin was demonstrably ‘influenced’ by Stoicism, but rather because Poussin has rendered the relation between irrational nature and Stoic virtue visually expressive.

     Later in this book I’ll offer an analogous account of how Muqi’s painting ‘6 Persimmons’ acquires textual meaning expressive of central doctrines of Ch’an Buddhism. But both the analyses of Poussin’s and Muqi’s paintings show the recruitment of language into artistic meaning in a visual artwork at as it were a later and highly refined stage. In order to complete the introductory sketch of language as an artistic resource in visual art, and to show how very basic features of language, analogous to those already outlined with regard to gesture and artifactuality, can be recruited, I consider Hamish Fulton’s work ‘Rock Fall Echo Dust’ (1989).

Fulton pieces is one of many that derive from and are expressive of his basic artistic practice of taking long walks of many days. His signature pieces are large photographs of natural settings within which the walk has occurred, with text overlain that states the place, duration, and mileage of the walk. ‘Rock Fall Echo Dust’ takes up this format and replaces the usual photograph with the title’s four words, each consisting of four letters, and arranged grid-like in alternating black and orange-red. The use of the text here is first of all an evocation: the viewer-reader is invited to imagine a wholly natural incident witnessed on the walk: a falling rock striking the ground with its immediate aural and visual effects. Or did Fulton push the rock? One notices that the initiating agency is unspecified. Then one notices that the determinate linear ordering of grammar and syntax starts to fade: each word can be both noun and verb; the ordering and visual presentation seem to equalize the weight of each word; the patterned alternation of colors sets up a counter-order: rock-echo and fall-dust. Language is here materialized and visually, but as an incitement of imagination away from the present visual artifact, and then immediately pulverized and rendered indeterminate. How is this possible?

     Consider two very basic features of language: in the course of analysis of Wittgenstein on language the philosopher Hans Julius Schneider shows that Wittgenstein had uncovered and drawn attention to the way in which in any instance of language use there is a combination of what Schneider calls calculation and imagination: calculation in the sense that for an utterance to so much as be intelligible the speaker must treat the existing meaning-bearing repertoire of language—the lexicon, semantics, grammar, syntax, and pragmatic understandings—as rule-like in its authoritative guidance of forming a new utterance; imagination in the sense that the new utterance is always novel, a projection of a previous understanding into a new context. Every new utterance is in this sense of creative act, not simply the application of rules (or rather, the mere application of rules is not really intelligible). One of Schneider’s central examples is Wittgenstein’s famous remark in the Philosophical Investigations that he was strongly inclined to say that Wednesday is fat and Tuesday lean, and that the words ‘fat’ and ‘lean’ must have in this context their familiar meanings, but the words and their meanings have been put to a use different from their typical ones (Wittgenstein, Part II, Section 274). The fat/lean example is dramatic, but on reflection quite generally true: all language use involves imaginative projection that “goes from the language (from a particular language game) to areas of “reality” to which we have not yet given voice in language” (Schneider, p. 84).

     In their book Relevance Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson draw attention to another basic aspect of language that Fulton recruits into his work which they designate as its capacity for ‘echoic’ (their word!) utterance. On their account linguistic echoing is a primary way in which second-degree interpretations, that is, complex thoughts involving the interpretations of others’ interpretations, enter language. Their example is ‘Peter’ saying “The Joneses aren’t coming to the party” and ‘Mary’ replied “They aren’t coming, hum. If that’s true, we might invite the Smiths” (Sperber and Wilson, p. 238). Mary’s response involves an interpretation of Peter’s thought and attitudes, ‘echoes’ it, and expresses her own attitude to both the fact of the Joneses not coming, something of her relation to Peter, and something of her own attitude to both. Fulton folds echoing, a basic linguistic capacity, into his visual work, both with its proper term and in its action of repetition, as the words ‘repeat’ the natural event, and give rise to an elusive atmosphere of attitudes to that event.

     There is of course an unsurveyably enormous amount more to be said about language as an artistic resource, some of which I hope to treat in a future volume on linguistic artworks. I turn next to the final great resource of artistic meaningfulness in the visual arts, the resource of vision itself.

 References:

Hans Julius Schneider, Wittgenstein’s Later Theory of Meaning: Imagination and Calculation (2014)

Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition (1986)

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953)

Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)

The World in an Eye, First Draft #9a: Protolanguage, Proto-Art, and Artifaction

   Having sketched the domain of artifactuality as a major resource for artistic meaningfulness, and prior to addressing the great resource of language, I pause to consider the question of the basis of artistic meaning in elaborations of artifacts. On a simple hylomorphic model, one might think of the course as involving two conceptually distinct steps and one consequence: 1. The maker produces an artifact by imposing some form upon some matter. 2. The maker-artist imposes some further form upon the artifact, a form that embodies the artistic meaning of the artifact. 3. This artistic meaning is itself understood hylomorphically as the fusion of two conceptually distinct elements (sound and sense; content and manner of presentation; the ‘what’ and the ‘how’; etc.) I have urged replacing this two-fold hylomorphism with, first, a model of artifactuality adopted from Gilbert Simondon and Tim Ingold, and second a model of artistic meaning taken over from Michael Podro and Patrick Maynard, which treats artistic meaning as the result of an enormous range of ways in which in artistic perception recognition is sustained. Maynard in his book on drawing argues that Podro’s conception of artistic meaning implies that the appropriate way of investigating artistic meaning in a particular art form is through considering non-artistic artifacts and art works as on a continuum, where on one end non-artistic artifacts exhibit a zero- or low-degree of artistic meaning, and on the other end great works of art like Rembrandt’s drawing of Hendrijke sleeping exhibit artistic meaning ‘at full stretch’, that is, where a variety of resources and mechanisms of artistic meaning are mobilized and integrated in the service of producing a maximally meaningful work. The questions arise: How does the artist work the artifact so that it moves as it were from the zero-end of the spectrum of artistic meaning? Indeed, how does the process of artistic meaning-making get going?

     The philosopher of art Richard Wollheim once remarked that, contra fashionable theories of art, one must think that in some sense the artist (and not some other agency—the viewer, theorists, ‘social energies’, etc.) puts the artistic meaning into an artwork; the alternatives are unintelligible. But if this putting is not well grasped hylomorphically as the imposition of form onto matter, leaving the matter in Simondon’s ‘dark zone’, then what conception of the inception of artistic making is consistent with the accounts I’ve introduced from Podro and Maynard? I suggest we introduce the conception of ‘proto-art’, a construction that is to some degree attested in hominid and early human aesthetic artifacts (one might well also refer to the historical instances as ‘paleoart’) as a bridge between artifacts and full-blown artworks. In order to see the range of relevant issues connected with the concept of proto-art, as an introduction I’lI sketch briefly the recent discussions of ‘protolanguage’ (which will also help introduce the imminent discussion of the next great artistic resource, language). The linguistic Derek Bickerton introduced the concept of a protolanguage as a tool in thinking about the evolutionary emergence of syntax. Bickerton hypothesized that prior to the emergence of full language (something like a lexicon + syntax + syntax (+ pragmatics + tenses)) hominids utilized a ‘protolanguage’ consisting of words but lacking any syntax, that is any meaning-bearing ordering of words (as in uninflected languages) and/or markers of relationships between words (as in inflected languages). Then sometime after 300K BP there occurred “an event, presumably a mutation of some kind, that affected a single female living in Africa” (Bickerton p. 165, quoted at Collins p. 117) and which permitted the introduction and development of syntax. Bickerton’s proposal has not found wide favor—the renowned linguist Daniel Everett points to the cultural achievements of Homo Erectus a million years earlier, and suggests that to accomplish these  they must have had something like full language; many others accept the idea that some pre-human hominids had a protolanguage, but dispute Bickerton’s characterization of it and/or the hypothesis of a single, sudden mutation--, but some conception of a protolanguage is needed to make sense of the evolutionary passage from the unstructured vocal and gestural communications of great apes to human language.

     So too with art: we need some conception of the highly aesthetic artifacts produced by hominids prior to the emergence of the full art of Paleolithic drawings, paintings, and sculptures. Currently the best known and most discussed instances of such proto-art are the engraved piece of ochre from Blombos Cave and the engravings ostrich shells of the Diepkloof Rock Shelter (both mentioned in earlier posts, and both to be discussed at some length later). My suggestion is that there is an illuminating, though limited, analogy between the conceptions of protolanguage and proto-art, specifically in an analogy between the emergence of syntax and the development of artistic meaning. Artistic meaning in the visual arts is not analogous to linguistic syntax in the sense that there is no meaning-bearing, determinate relationship between elements of artistic meaning, as there is between lexical items and syntactical ordering. But the analogy does draw our attention to the fact that there must have been some process of emergence of artistic meaning from the zero degree to the relatively simple to Maynard’s full stretch. The passage from the zero degree to the relatively simple kinds of artistic meaning must have been very early in the evolution of humanity, and would reasonably be further conceptualized as something that remains part of the human repertoire of behavior as something both meaning-making and pleasurable. What might that be?

     I suggest that the renowned ethologically-informed and evolutionary theorist of art Ellen Dissanayake has provided the key conceptual resource for understanding the emergence of artistic meaningfulness with her conception of artistic behavior as ‘making special’ (Dissanayake 1995), with her recent writings replacing that term with the semantically equivalent coinage ‘artifaction’ (Dissanayake 2014 and 2018). Like a number of anthropologists and thinkers concerned with human psychological and cultural evolution, Dissanayake abandons appeals to the concept of art in the investigation of human behavior, on the grounds that ‘our’ concept of art is irredeemably infected with modern, ‘Western’/Eurocentric conceptions, including a prejudice against behavior in favor of artifacts, an exaggerated concern for ‘meaning’ conceived as representational subject-matter, and the assumption of a normatively non-participatory and disinterested attitude as solicited by and appropriate to artworks (as is evident, I do not follow her in this). Instead of attempting to explain and understand the concept of art and its instantiating artifacts, Dissanayake urges that we focus on a particular kind of behavior that she considers a human universal, namely ‘making special’ or ‘artifaction’. Such behavior is attested in the human archeological record and in all human cultures. Artifaction has two characteristics: First, human beings exhibit a variety of behaviors wherein they move from an ordinary, routine, prosaic, habitual, and/or goal-oriented attitude towards the world and shift into a different attitude. One sees this kind of shift in pervasive human phenomena including play and ritual. Second, there is a realm of such extra-ordinary attitudes and behavior that is distinct from, though frequently overlapping with, the realms of play and ritual, which is artifaction proper. Artifaction and its behavior exhibits one or more of the following characteristics: formalization; repetition; exaggeration; elaboration; manipulation of expectations (paradigmatically by unexpected placement or unusual, strong juxtaposition) (Dissanayake (2018), p. 34). One of Dissanayake’s examples of making-special/artifaction is the full festive display of a dancer in New Guinea; here is a similar example:

     The philosopher Stephen Davies has criticized Dissanayake’s initial formulation of making-special with the claims that the behavior of making-special is neither restricted to the arts, nor does it provide sufficient conceptual and practical material for making sense of the evaluative and historical dimensions of all art (see Davies 2007). Dissanayake has responded (rightly to my mind) that it was no part of her intention to identify and characterize the distinctive features of artworks, but rather to show the kinds of species-specific behavior out of which art arises. Similarly, I am not taking Dissanayake to have uncovered the full range of artistic meaningfulness, but rather to have identified pervasive ways in which artifacts are elaborated and brought to the realm of proto-art, which then in turn admit of further elaboration into the artistic meaningfulness at full stretch with the use and integration of mechanisms from a great range of possibilities of the kinds identified by Podro, Maynard, and many others.

     In a very different way than Dissanayake, the theoreticians Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson have identified in their seminal book on relevance a kind of basis of artistic meaningfulness that seems more specific to language, though can plausibly be thought to apply to the full range of arts. In my next post I turn to Sperber’s and Wilson’s thought, and then go on to sketch the great artistic resource which is human language.

References and Works Consulted:

Barry Allen, Artifice and Design: Art and Technology in Human Experience (2008)

Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972)

Derek Bickerton, Language and Species (1990)

Christopher Collins, Paleopoetics: The Evolution of the Preliterate Imagination (2013)

Stephen Davies, ‘Ellen Dissanayake’s Evolutionary Aesthetic’, in Philosophical Perspectives on Art (2007)

Ellen Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why (1995)

--‘A Bona Fide Ethological View of Art: The Artification Hypothesis’, in Art as Behaviour: An Ethological Approach to Visual and Verbal Art, Music and Architecture (2014), ed. Christa Sütterlin et alia

--‘The Concept of Artifaction’, in Ellen Dissanayake and Ekkehart Malotki, Early Rock Art of the American Southwest (2018)

Daniel Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention (2017)

W. Tecumseh Fitch, ‘Empirical approaches to the study of language evolution’, in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (2017)

Tim Ingold, Making (2013)

Patrick Maynard, Drawing Distinctions (2005)

Michael Podro, Depiction (1998)

Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition (1995)

Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (2020)

Maggie Tallerman, ‘The origins of the lexicon: how a word-store evolved’, in The Prehistory of Language (2009), ed. Rudolf Botha and Chris Knight

The World in an Eye, First Draft #8.3: On Bricks and Baskets

I turn now to a sketch of a non-hylomorphic conception of artifacts that will capture the uses of artifactuality as a major resource of artistic meaningfulness. As I noted in an initial post of this first draft, one of my major polemical targets would be hylomorphic conceptions of meaning in art. As I understand it, a hylomorphic conception of artistic meaning has at least the following characteristics: (a) There is such a thing as distinctively artistic meaning that (b) consists in a fusion of two conceptually distinct strata of meaningfulness, and (c) where one stratum is identical consists of meanings that artworks also share with non-artistic artifacts and (d) the other stratum contains elements distinctive of the manner of presentation of the artwork. From among the many dualisms invoked to describe and explain artistic meaning (e.g. form/content and sound/sense), perhaps the most prominent is the ‘what’ and the ‘how’; the ‘what’ (the ‘content’, ‘subject’, ‘message’, etc.) is conceptually identical in artworks and in non-artworks such as ordinary prose, quotidian utterances, advertising signs, or political slogans, while the ‘how’ (the ‘medium’, the ‘mode of presentation’, the ‘format’, etc.) is distinctive of the particular artwork qua material or embodied in some communicative medium. I have already indicated how Michael Podro’s account of artistic meaning as ‘sustaining recognition’ dispenses with the hylomorphic model. How might we likewise expel hylomorphism from what commonsensically seems to be its homeland, in our very conception of artifacts?

     Already in the mid-1930s the philosopher Martin Heidegger had called attention both to the dominance of the hylomorphic model in thinking about artworks as artifacts, and also to its inappropriateness. Heidegger noted that the “distinction of matter and form is the conceptual schema which is used, in the greatest variety of ways, quite generally for all art theory and aesthetics” (p. 27, italics in original), and goes on to urge that the hylomorphic model is superficial and/or inappropriate both for an account of things generally and artworks in particular; Heidegger famously characterizes artworks as ‘the happening of truth’ (p. 38) (alternately, “the setting-into-work of truth” (p. 77)) wherein there is a “conflict of world and earth” (p. 62). Evidently these formulations demand (and have received) a great deal of interpretation and explication, but it cannot be said that they have been taken up outside of the academic hothouse of Heidegger scholarship. And so, as indicated at the end of my previous post, I instead turn to what seems to me the two most illuminating philosophical re-conceptualizations and analyses of artifactuality in the post-WWII period, Gilbert Simondon’s account of brick-making and Tim Ingold’s explication of making a basket.

     Recall that Simondon’s basic critical point with regard to hylomorphism is that it leaves the actual process whereby form combines with (or unites with, is imposed upon, elicits and actualizes potentials from, etc.) matter in a ‘dark zone’. Aristotle and his hylomorphism starts from a thing that is already constituted, an individual that is already one thing with a nature that makes it what it is, and in the service of explanation abstracts from it a conception of its form and a conception of its matter. Explicitly opposing hylomorphism, Simondon from what he calls a ‘metastabile’ system within which there is a process of individuation, of becoming-an-individual. The individual that Aristotle treats as ontologically basic is for Simondon a phase of a process of individuation that he calls its ‘genesis’. (Remarkably, some recent work in Anglo-American philosophy of biology proceeds in a closely analogous way; see, for example, the influential work of John Dupre.) An artifact is individuated not by an imposition of a form on a passive and undetermined matter (p. 35), but rather when two distinct chains of preliminary operations are brought together. What does this mean?

     Simondon’s chief example of an artifact is a clay brick, and his analysis (pp. 22-32) seems to me one of the great revelatory examples in twentieth-century philosophy, along with Heidegger’s broken hammer, Sartre’s voyeur at the keyhole, or Wittgenstein’s builders. What could better lend itself to hylomorphic analysis than putting some homogeneous, featureless clay into a mold to form a brick? But no: the making of the brick is a fundamentally dynamic operation wherein (i) the clay is packed (ii) a fabricated mold. For the clay to admit of being so packed, it must have been prepared: the clay in the marsh or the quarry must be extracted, and then submitted to operations that make it homogenous. Likewise, the mold is not some pre-given geometric form, but rather a concrete material mold that must have been constructed and then prepared so that the humid clay won’t stick to the mold. (i) and (ii) are not ‘matter’ and ‘form’, but rather what Simondon calls “two half-trains of transformation that encounter one another” (p. 24) The ‘form’, the understanding of which had always caused Aristotle’s readers perplexities, is drained of its mystery: in brick-making it is what limits and stabilizes the prepared clay, and it as it were already ‘contains’ actions as its potential uses (p. 25). The ‘matter’ is something that has essentially already become, and exists as a phase with a capacity for further becoming.

     In the influential essay ‘On Weaving a Basket’ of the year 2000, the anthropologist Tim Ingold analyzes basket-making in a manner that largely overlaps with Simondon’s analysis of brick-making, and indeed in a later book Making (2013) he recapitulates his initial analysis and explicitly adds support from Simondon. Ingold starts from the idea that instead of thinking of weaving as a kind of making, one might think of making generally on the model of weaving. Following points that Franz Boas had already made in his canonical Primitive Art (1927), Ingold focuses upon the manufacture of a basket made, or rather built up from, coils of clay. The maker rolls the clay into long tubes (Ingold starts a step later than Simondon, since in Ingold’s example the clay is already homogeneous) then lays the coil in a roughly circular manner, placing the coil progressively upon itself in order to build an initial shape. Ingold acknowledges that the maker may well have a precise conception of the intended finished shape, but that, as for Simondon, nothing corresponds to the imposition of a form upon some matter. Rather, “the form of the basket is the result of a play of forces, both internal and external to the material that makes it up” (p. 342). And following Boas, Ingold notes the temporalization of making that is internal to artifactuality: an artifact “is the crystallization of activity within a relational field, its regularities of form embodying the regularities of movement that gave rise to it” (p. 345).

     What do we gain for the understanding of artistic meaning by replacing the Aristotelean-cum-commonsensical hylomorphic conception of artifacts with Simondon’s and Ingold’s conceptions? Neither Simondon nor Ingold offer accounts of artistic meaning, and indeed I cannot see that either introduces anything like the conceptual tools that would permit its comprehension (of course, they did not intend to). The superiority of their accounts for my purposes turns on two salient points: First, they make plausible the difficult thought that there is a sense of the temporality of making that is internal to the experience of artifacts, and so some sense of that temporality can be mobilized in the service of artistic meaning. The idea that artists recruit under some conception the manner in which their works are made into the meaning of their works has been proposed countless times, but the hylomorphic conception left that idea, along with the process of making itself, in the dark zone. Second, both accounts note the further sense of some background (in Simondon the ‘metastable system’ out of which individuation occurs; in Ingold the relational field of a play of forces) within which the artifact arises, and so as with the temporality of making is available as a resource of artistic meaning. Later in the book, in analyses of the sense of rhythm in ornamentation, of the tendency towards cosmic representations in art, and of the materiality of artistic mediums, I shall show how these accounts can be put to use in making sense of kinds of artistic meaning that have been overlooked or have seemed intractable under traditional conceptions.

     With the resources that I’ve introduced so far, I can in my next post turn to a consideration of what I call proto-art, especially as conceptualized through the recently developed concept of ‘artifaction’, and thereafter consider the final great general resource of artistic meaningfulness, language.

References and Works Consulted:

Franz Boas, Primitive Art (1927)

Gilles Deleuze, ‘On Gilbert Simondon’, in Desert islands and other texts, 1953-1974 (2004)

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1980)

John Dupre, Processes of Life: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology (2012)

Montgomery Furth, Substance, Form, and Psyche: An Aristotelean Metaphysics (1988)

Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Poetry, Language, Thought (1971)

Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (1973)

Tim Ingold, ‘On Weaving a Basket’, in The Perception of the Environment (2000)

--Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture (2013)

Carl Mitcham, Thinking Through Technology: The Path Between Engineering and Philosophy (1994)

Michael Podro, Depiction (1998)

Beth Preston, A Philosophy of Material Culture: Action, Function, and Mind (2013)

Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (2017)

-- Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (2020)

--Imagination and Invention (2022)

--‘Sciences de la nature et sciences de l’homme’, in Sur la philosophie (1950-1980) (2004)

The World in an Eye, First Draft 8.2: The historicity of artifacts and Aristotle’s hylomorphic account

In my previous post I introduced the topic of artifactuality as a major resource of artistic meaningfulness. As with all the discussions of the great resources—the body, the hand, gesture, etc.—the accounts here are both introductory and highly selective, presented as an initial orientation and intended to be more fully developed later in the book in concrete analyses of works of individual works. Before turning to the basic model of artifacts that I’ll adopt, drawing heavily from the works of the philosopher Gilbert Simondon and the anthropologist Tim Ingold, here I first briefly expand on the constitutive historicity of artifacts, and then turn to my major polemical target, the hylomorphic (matter + form) conception of artworks as inaugurated by Aristotle in his account of artifacts.

     There is a sizeable recent literature in analytic philosophy on artifacts, most of which addresses basic ontological questions, such as ‘What is an artifact?’, ‘Are artifacts rightly understood as something limited to and distinctive of human beings, or are animal constructions (e.g. birds’ nests and beavers’ dams) also artifacts?’, and ‘Are artifacts identified by their (proper) functions?’ (e.g. Is a chair identified by its function as something-upon-which-to-sit?). In my previous post, oriented like this one towards the question of how artifactuality contributes resources of artistic meaning, I noted two characteristics of artifacts: that they are products and expressive of human intentionality and action, and their historicity, which is part means that there is a backwards-looking aspect to any artifact; this historicity is indicated by, for example, the fact that something is a chair in part because there is a socially established category of chairs, and that the current instance of a chair is a member of that category in part because it relevantly resembles some paradigmatic past instances of chairs. The major recent philosophical contribution to reflection upon artworks’ and so also artifacts’ historicity is a series of papers by the philosopher of art Jerrold Levinson articulating and defending what he calls the ‘intentional-historical’ conception of art. This conception arises as a competitor in the discussion of the ontological status of artworks in the 1960s through 1980s, where the leading candidates were Arthur Danto’s initial characterization (1964) of artworks as whatever is taken to be artworks according to contemporaneous theories of art, his later characterization of artworks as artifacts that embody their meaning (1981), and George Dickie’s institutional theory of art, in its initial crude characterization (1974) and then refined characterization, both that center on the claim that what makes something a work of art is its recognition as such by relevant authorities and institutions. On Levinson’s conception, “to be art is, roughly, to be an object connected in a particular manner, in the intention of a maker or profferer, with preceding art or art-regards: the agent in question intends the object for regard (treatment, assessment, reception, doing with)in some way or ways that what are acknowledged as already artworks, are or were correctly regarded or done with.” (Levinson (1996), p. 151) He further claims superiority for his account in that for him the historicity of art is internal to art, not a matter of some extra-artistic (theoretical, social, institutional, etc. factor) (p. 152), and so posits for each new putative instance of art “a relation to the concrete history of art-making and art-projection” (Levinson (2007), p. 75). Levinson thinks that, just as Danto’s and Dickie’s conceptions were induced by the theoretical challenges of works like Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades and Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, so his conception is motivated by the attempt to understand later works in Conceptual Art and Post-Minimal Art, which allegedly show that (visual?) artworks need not be more or less stable material objects at all. More generally, and shared with Danto and Dickie, he thinks that the past century of artistic innovation has produced “alternate modes of art-making . . .  artworks need not be fashioned by their creators, need not involve recognized artistic media, need not be aimed at satisfying aesthetic interests, and whose making need not be governed by any very substantial conception of a genre in which the artist is working” (p. 82)

     One effect of this recent history, according to Levinson, is that artworks, in marked contrast to non-artistic artifacts generally, have no identifying function (such as being beautiful, embodying meaning, inducing aesthetic experience, etc.), and are only identified via the relevant backward-looking intentions and history. I’ll consider Levinson’s account of Paleolithic art later in this book, and his general conception at length in a later book on contemporary art. We need not consider here the plausibility of the startlingly parsimonious character of Levinson’s account in order to treat it as partially explicating the sense of historicity in artworks.

     I turn now to the major topic of this post, the hylomorphic conception of artifacts in Aristotle, and its criticism by Simondon and Ingold. In a recent major contribution to such a conception, Simon Evnine notes that “[t]he elaboration of Aristotle’s theory [of hylomorphism] is multi-faceted, often highly obscure, and subject to almost endless commentary and controversy.” (Evnine, p. 7) Conscience requires me to remind the reader that this is a crude and very partial summary of Aristotle’s account of artifacts; an even minimally adequate account would additionally require introduction of Aristotle’s metaphysics of substance and of the basic concepts of potentiality and actuality. So: initially, by ‘hylomorphism’ we mean any philosophical or theoretical account that treats entities (things, beings, etc.) as compounds of matter (Greek hulē) and form (Greek morphē or eidos). It is one of the great moments in the history of humanity and its reflections when Aristotle introduces hylomorphism in the first book of his Physics in the context of trying to understand change, and in particular how to understand the difference between change on the one hand, and coming-to-be and passing-away simpliciter on the other.  His basic thought is that in change, as opposed to simple emergence or destruction, something persists through the change, while what changes is some accidental (i.e. non-essential) characteristic, which he thinks involves contraries, as the-lack-of-something becomes the-presence-of-something. What underlies the change and persists through the change is the material, and he adds that the material and the thing’s form are jointly responsible for the product.

     Immediately questions arise: What is material, and what is form? In what sense and ways are they ‘combined’ in artifacts, and how does this combining take place? While Aristotle later in the Metaphysics considers artifacts in relation to substance, and in History of Animals considers organisms hylomorphically, in the first three chapters of Book 2 of the Physics he first explicates the fundamental contrast between products of nature and products of art (technē), i.e. artifacts (technika), and then elaborates the conceptions of matter and form in setting out the so-called doctrine of four causes, or, better, four ways of citing cause (matter, form, agent, goal (telos or to hou heneka), stated succinctly at Physics 2.3 194b24-195a3). The distinction between the products of nature (organisms and their parts, plants, and ‘simple things of bodies’ (ta hapla tōn sōmatōn), such as earth, fire, air, and water) (2.1 192b8-11) and the products of art is that the former have an internal principle of change (for Aristotle, of movement and rest), and the latter do not have within themselves the principle of their own making. Rather, the principle (or: source (archē)) of the products of nature resides in some external agent, “as in the case of the house and its builder, and so with all hand-made things” (2.1 192b28-31) The four ways of citing cause or giving explanatory factors tend to collapse into two, particularly with regard to the explication of artifacts, where it is the agent, guided by some aim, who gives the form to the material: matter on the one hand, and agent/aim/form on the other, are the central explanatory factors. Aristotle’s most typical examples of the use of the account of the four causes in the service of hylomorphism are houses: the builder (agent) arranges bricks (matter/material) with the aim of producing a house (form) in the service of shelter and habitation (aim); Polycleitos (agent) shapes bronze (matter/material) to produce a statue (form) that induces wonder (aim).

     The conception of artifacts plays a peculiar role in Aristotle’s overall system. On the one hand, the hylomorphic analysis of artifacts like the bronze statue provides the model of hylomorphic analysis generally, including organisms, other products of nature, and substances; on the other hand Aristotle does not treat artifacts as substances but rather ultimately places them, as Katayama puts it in his exhaustive study, in the “group of nonsubstantial pragmata, such as heaps” (Katayama, p. 11). Aristotle then does not address the issue of artworks as artifacts, nor a fortiori the question of the distinctiveness of artistic meaningfulness, although the account in the Poetics of the cathartic effect of tragedy remains as suggestive as it is elusive. For now, as a preliminary to my account of Simondon’s and Ingold’s on artifacts in the next post, I just note their criticisms of Aristotle. In a number places, and most extensively in his major work on individuation, Simondon notes that hylomorphic accounts leave a ‘dark zone’ that occludes or ignores how the artifact is made. This lack is particularly important, so I will argue, because the sheer fact and basic features of how an artifact is made will turn out to be important elements recruited into artistic meaning, as in this drawing by Van Gogh, [Photo Van Gogh]

but also in early artifacts that I’ll treat as instances of ‘proto-art’, as in the decorated eggshells that were produced for several tens of thousands of years starting by 60,000 BP.

      Ingold’s criticism is consistent with Simondon’s, though with an emphasis on the explanatory role of the agent as something external to the artifact that supplies its form. Ingold notes that the hylomorphic account turns the form into something in the mind of the agent that (conceptually) pre-exists the artifact, and then treats the actual process of making as an imposition of form upon some pre-existent and relatively unformed matter. To see the justness of Ingold’s claim, consider a typical statement in the philosophy of art, here from R. G. Collingwood’s The Principles of Art: “Making an artifact, or acting according to a craft, thus consists of two stages. (1) Making the plan, which is creating. (2) Imposing that plan on a certain matter, which is fabricating.” (Collingwood, p. 133)

      The hylomorphic model is so entrenched that it is difficult to consider it as something other than an uncontroversial truism. What is the alternative? In my next post I’ll turn to the revolutionary accounts given by Simondon and Ingold, and consider how the two thinkers apply them specifically to the arts.

 References and Works Consulted:

 Barry Allen, Knowledge and Civilization (2004)

--Artifice and Design: Art and Technology in Human Experience (2008)

Aristotle, History of Animals

--Metaphysics

--Physics

--Poetics

Paul Bloom, ‘Intention, history, and artifact concepts’, in Cognition (1996)

R. G. Collingwood, Principles of Art (1938)

Simon Evnine, Making Objects and Events: A Hylomorphic Theory of Artifacts, Actions, and Organisms (2016)

Arthur Danto, ‘The Artworld’ (1964)

--Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981)

George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (1974)

--The Art Circle: A Theory of Art (1984)

Kit Fine, ‘Aristotle on Matter’, in Mind (1992)

Daniel Graham, Aristotle’s Two Systems (1987)

Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (1973)

Tim Ingold, ‘On Weaving a Basket’, in The Perception of the Environment (2000)

--Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture (2013)

Errol Katayama, Aristotle on Artifacts: A Metaphysical Puzzle (1999)

Jerrold Levinson, ‘Extending Art Historically’, in The Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (1996)

--‘Artworks as Artifacts’, in Creations of the Mind, Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence (eds) (2007)

Wilfrid Sellars, ‘Substance and Form in Aristotle’ and ‘Raw Materials, Subjects, and Substrata’, in Philosophical Perspectives: History of Philosophy (2011)

Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (2017)

-- Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (2020)

The World in an Eye, First Draft #8.1: Artifactuality

I turn now to the great and so to speak most proximal resource for artistic meaningfulness, which I’ll call ‘artifactuality’, the sense that an artwork is something made by human beings. As introduced in my previous post, the basic feature of artistic meaningfulness, the ‘twice over’ characteristic described by Michael Podro and Patrick Maynard, can arise only upon the basis of the recognition of the made quality of an artwork, on something like the following conceptual sequence: (i) the viewer recognizes something in the work, that is, (part of) the work’s subject or content; (ii) the viewer senses expressiveness in the made quality of the manner in which the subject is presented; and (iii) the viewer projects relations (similarities, analogies, contrasts, etc.) between subject and manner of presentation. As important as the ‘twice over’ is, the resources of artifactuality are much broader, and indeed help build and enrich every aspect of artistic meaningfulness. Or so I shall argue. In this post I’ll give an introduction to the resource of artworks’ artifactuality,  and so prepare for the coming great confrontation between the Aristotelean hylomorphic conception of artifacts and the alternative conception, most notably introduced and developed by the philosopher Gilbert Simondon and the anthropologist Tim Ingold, that I’ll adopt.

     About one hundred years ago in his Lectures on Fine Art, the philosopher Hegel set out what he called the three common ideas of art: “(i) The work of art is no natural product; it is brought about by human activity; (ii) it is essentially made for man’s apprehension, and in particular is drawn more or less from the sensuous field for apprehension by the senses; (iii) it has an end and aim in itself.” (Hegel, p. 25) Hegel takes up these three ideas and gives them what must be called a maximalist interpretation in light of his systematic philosophy. Here I only note that the first point is a statement of the artifactuality of artworks, which he quickly re-conceptualizes as the claim that works of art are ‘higher’ than nature or natural products, in that they are products of the ‘spirit’, that is, (very roughly put) the historical and conceptual structure of recognitions, takings (that is, taking something to be something), practices, institutions, and interpretations that make up human culture. The effect of this is alleged to be that “Human interest, the spiritual value possessed by an event, an individual character, an action in its complexity and outcomes, is grasped in the work of art and blazoned more purely and more transparently than is possible on the ground of other non-artistic things.” (p. 29) A less maximalist, though still substantive, way of explicating the first point makes two claims: artworks qua artifacts are intention-dependent, that is, they are made for something, or with the aim of accomplishing something; and that artworks qua artifacts are historical, in the senses that (a) they are always items within a temporally extended tradition of making, (b) the recognition of which is part of their meaning (aim, purpose, import, etc.) (These two claims will be discussed in the next post via consideration of recent philosophical essays by Paul Bloom, Jerrold Levinson, and Amie Thomasson (see references below)). In general I shall follow Hegel in building the conception of artistic meaning, with his three common ideas rephrased as the three resources of artifactuality, perceptibility, and autonomy.

      As an alternative route into the nature of artifactuality, one that additionally foreshadows something of the alternate Simondon-Ingold conception of artifacts for which I’ll argue, consider Wallace Stevens’s crowd-pleaser, ‘Anecdote of the Jar’:

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.

The jar was round upon the ground

And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.

The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush,

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

     The poem presents a stark, though not absolute, contrast between the jar, a prototypical artifact, and the ‘wilderness’, seemingly a prototypical conception of what is not- or other-than-human, and so a version of the great dichotomy nature/culture. Nothing encourages the thought that the speaking voice is also the maker of the jar, and the reader more likely assumes that the origin of the jar is a matter of indifference; what matters rather is that it is an unadorned (“gray and bare”) artifact in the shape of a cylinder (“round” and “tall”; “of a port” suggests both that it is open, and, in an idiomatic sense of ‘of a port’, of some importance and/or striking bearing). While the action of making is backgrounded, the opening spondee of “I placed” signals the fundamental action that frames and induces the significance of all that follows in the poem: the jar is placed on a hill. The central mark of the jar’s artifactuality is its roundness (roundness, alone with squareness, will play a major roles later in the book as fundamental to the ways that artworks establish a conception of the larger world outside the work). The poem goes on to emphasize the way that the placing of the jar organizes that which is outside of the jar: Prior to the placement that which is already there is at most a ‘slovenly wilderness’, and the speaker’s action of placing the jar induces the highlighted actions and re-conceptualizations wherewith the wilderness surrounds the hill, rises up, and even loses its character as ‘wilderness’, something wholly other-than-human. As the agent and prop of such massive re-organization, the jar and its placing are said, surely with an echo of Genesis, to take dominion everywhere. Whereas Tennessee ‘gives of’ bird and bush, paradigmatically natural beings, the jar, as culture set against nature, is alien to the items of Tennessee.—So runs a standard interpretation.

     But there is more, it seems to me, and something which helps make sense of the peculiar ambivalence of the poem, an ambivalence which has seemed to induce a range of interpretations claiming for the poem the full range of attitudes from celebrating the human conquest of nature to Romantically lamenting the human destruction of nature. The philosopher of art Richard Wollheim once remarked to me that works of art have a way of teaching you how to understand them. If one reads the poem aloud a few hundred times, one perhaps begins to notice that the poem seems to embody or exemplify the very conceptions it states. One notices peculiar patches of order—the oddly introduced and oddly abandoned rhyming of ‘air/bare/everywhere’ that cuts across the break between the second and third stanzas; the rhyming of ‘round/ground’, something that connects words that seem otherwise to signal items from either side of the culture/nature dichotomy—along with determined disorganizing effects—the seemingly clumsy and run-on feel of ‘Surround that hill’; the catachresis of a wilderness that is no longer wild; the peculiar resistance to meaning of the word ‘give’. Nor does the very framing of a dichotomy quite make sense, for the wilderness is not a thing wholly other, for, if nothing else, it admits of some conceptualization as part of a delimited spatial and political entity, Tennessee. This latter point, that the dichotomy culture/nature cannot be sustained in general, and in particular in conceptualizing artifacts, will become central in the conception adopted here. And the former point, that there are major aspects of artistic meaningfulness that are bound up with the ways in which they may become intelligible, in particular through the self-exemplifying character of meaning in art, will be developed in later sections of the book.

     In my next post I turn to the contribution of recent analytic philosophy in understanding the central characteristics of the resource of artifactuality, the intention-dependent and historical character of artifacts.

References:

Paul Bloom, ‘Intention, history, and artifact concepts’, in Cognition (1996)

G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art

Tim Ingold, ‘On Weaving a Basket’, in The Perception of the Environment (2000)

Jerrold Levinson, ‘Artworks as Artifacts’, in Creations of the Mind, Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence (eds) (2007)

Patrick Maynard, Drawing Distinctions (2005)

Michael Podro, Depiction (1998)

Wallace Stevens, ‘Anecdote of the Jar’ (1919), in Harmonium (1923)

Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (2017)

-- Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (2020)

Amie Thomasson, ‘Artifacts and Human Concepts’, in Creations of the Mind , Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence (eds) (2007)

The World in an Eye, First Draft #7: Gesture

The previous considerations of body and hand as resources of artistic meaningfulness aimed inter alia to bring to view two foundational aspects of the making and the species-wide intelligibility of the arts. First, and above all, the orientational aspects of embodiment—near/far, up/down, front-back, inside/outside—together with image schemas and basic experientialist conceptualizations provide a major part of the universal content and structures in the visual arts. Second, the account of projection, as applied to and across the distinction between peri-personal and extrapersonal space, opens the explication of how artistic meaning is formed in the processes of artistic making. Additionally, Tallis’s account of how the conceptualization of the hand retroacts upon the prior conceptualization of the body is a first instance of the holistic and open-ended quality of meaningfulness that will come to illuminate the basic characteristics of the inexhaustibility and (as yet unmentioned) ineffability of artistic meaning. In this post on gesture, and in succeeding posts on artifactuality, making, and technics, the guiding concern will be to provide the basis of another fundamental feature of artistic meaning, what the philosopher Patrick Maynard, himself explicitly following up indications from Michael Podro, has called the phenomenon of the ‘twice over’. The concern to explicate this phenomenon will then guide my selective accounts of gesture and artifactuality.

     The phenomenon of ‘twice over’ is a major way in which in Podro’s sense recognition is sustained. Recall Podro’s account of artistic meaning in the visual arts: “At the core of depiction is the recognition of its subject, and this remains so even when the subject is radically transformed and recognition becomes correspondingly extended; it remains so not because we seek the subject matter despite the complications of painting but because recognition and complication are each further by the other, each serves the other.” (Podro, p. 5) Now, in depiction there is the subject depicted, and there is the formative process whose result is the depiction. The viewer’s awareness of the formative process, an awareness of the mechanisms of depiction--the brush strokes, marks, manipulations of the hand, etc.--, and any aspect whatsoever of the formative process given to the viewer in perception or imagination, is an awareness of the complications of recognition. A central mark of artistic meaningfulness is that the viewer is induced to interrelate the subject recognized and the complications of recognition, which typically includes analogizing one to the other and/or projecting an aspect of one onto an aspect of another (p. 8). Since artistic marking is something done, a human action, is bears expressive qualities that Podro calls ‘impulse’ (p. 9) or ‘energy’ (p. 13).

     Podro’s point is not easy to grasp abstractly, so consider one of his early examples:

Podro describes an instance the phenomenon of twice over here in Veronese’s ‘Allegory of Deceit’ with “the sense of the brush across the heavy weave canvas intimates the physical immanence of the woman’s back while the shifts from opaque to translucent paint give a sense of a visual density into which we look.” (ibid)

      As the example suggests, the expressiveness of ‘impulse’ and ‘energy’ are not in their roles in artistic meaning not necessarily expressive of emotion, mood, or feeling, but rather more typically express aspects of the formative process, and indeed of elaborated or refined aspects of that process. But what reason do we have to think that the viewer of a visual artwork infers automatically from the recognition that the work is an artifact, the product of human action, something done and made, to the imputation of impulse and energy to aspects of the artwork? My suggestion is that the projection of species-wide aspects of gesture and artifactuality provide the inferential path.

    So, what is gesture, and what are its projectable characteristics? Despite, or perhaps because of, the omnipresence of gesture in human life, it has only been the subject of sustained philosophical and anthropological reflection in recent decades, most notably in the fundamental works of Adam Kendon and David McNeill. Surprisingly, the great work of André Leroi-Gourhan Gesture and Speech (originally 1964) offers little on gesture aside from noting that it becomes possible in hominid evolution with bipedalism, and that in the course of human history the hand becomes freed from tasks of direct grasping and manipulation through the development of tools and machines; the communicative dimension of gesture is wholly neglected. For Kendon, McNeill, and most recent thinkers, the orienting observation is that most human speech is accompanied by gestures. McNeill treats the definition of gestures as unproblematic and contents himself with the thought that gestures are “spontaneous movements”, “usually movements of the arms and hands” that “are closely synchronized with the flow of speech” (McNeill (1992), p. 11). For Kendon  the elementary temporal structure of gesture consists of three phases: the movement of the hand forward and away from the speaker; the stroke; and the return of the hand to quiescence (p. 25).

    McNeill finds five great categories of gestures: iconic (pictorial); metaphoric (iconic, but presents an abstract idea); beats (quasi-rhythmic, where the hand “moves along with the rhythmical pulsation of speech”; (cohesives (“serves to tie together thematically related but temporally separated parts of the discourse”); deictics (pointing to indicate objects and events in the concrete world, but also to an abstract concept related to a place). (pp. 12-18) McNeill further follows Kendon in ordering types of gesture in a continuum from gesticulation (gesture in the prototypical sense) to increasingly language-like movements: language-like gesticulation (as in “the parents were all right, but the kids were [gesture]”), then to pantomimes, emblems (conventional signs such as the ‘OK’ with the hand), and, at the far end of the continuum, sign languages (pp. 37-8).

     I must defer discussion of the linguistic aspects of gesture until I have discussed language as a resource of artistic meaningfulness, but a bit more can be given now about non-linguistic gesticulation proper. McNeill notes two fundamental ways in which gesticulation differs from language in being global and synthetic. Gestures are global in the sense that the gesture as a whole is not composed out of parts that are themselves meaningful; rather the parts gain whatever meaning they have because of the meaning of the whole. For example, a speaker wiggles his fingers as he says “and he’s trying to run ahead of it” (p. 20). The gesture has parts by virtue of the elementary structure of gestures—the wiggling is part of the stroke--, but the parts are not independently meaningful. The gesture is synthetic in that it combines different (linguistically) meaningful elements: the wiggling of the fingers combines ‘he + running + along the wire’. (p. 21).

     In light of McNeill’s example, I cannot resist recalling my introductory description of Warlpiri sand drawing; the reader will notice how a great deal of McNeill’s analysis readily applies to the analysis of the drawings. One need only supply the mechanism of projection, that is, that fundamental aspects of gesticulation—the global and synthetic, and the communicative dimensions of the iconic and the emblematic—to see the drawings as abstracted gesture.

     In my next post I’ll turn to a lengthy consideration of the central manipulative and expressive uses of the hand in artifactuality and technics, and beginning with my most sustained attack on the hylomorphic model in its homeland, that is, in Aristotle’s account of artifacts in his Physics.

References and Works Consulted:

David Armstrong, William Stokoe, Sherman Wilcox, Gesture and the Nature of Language (1995)

Adam Kendon, Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance (2004)

André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech (1993)

Patrick Maynard, Drawing Distinctions (2005)

Colin McGinn, Prehension (2015)

David McNeill, Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal About Thought (1992)

Michael Podro, Depiction (1999)

Raymond Tallis, The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being (2003)