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)

The World in an Eye, First Draft, #6: The Hand

Having finished with an introductory consideration of the body as a basic resource of artistic meaningfulness, I turn now to consider the hand, a part of the body so laden with significance that I’ll give it separate, albeit brief, consideration. Since the publication of John Napier’s pioneering book Hands in 1980, the human hand has been treated extensively in evolutionary theory and neuroscience, as well as in philosophy, most notably by Raymond Tallis and Colin McGinn. As with any interesting topic, there are not only a variety of approaches but also basic differences in conceptualization. For example, how should one delimit ‘the hand’? Is it just that part of the body at the end of the arm beyond the wrist, or does it include the neural mechanisms and circuits activated in its typical actions? Is it limited to the body narrowly construed, or is it illuminating to consider it together with the space of its use proximal to the human body? As throughout this consideration of resources of meaningfulness, I bypass these kinds of questions, and my treatment will be highly selective because wholly oriented towards considering what and how hands, and basic phenomena tightly bound to the use of hands, are recruited into the arts. The treatment in this post will also be brief and introductory, as much of my treatment of the hand will be more substantively addressed in the major following topics of gesture, artifactuality, technology, and language.

     One might begin to consider the range of uses of the hand as comprising three great categories: manipulation, exploration, and communication. In manipulation the hand grasps something to some end. Napier influentially treats manipulation in terms of two major of categories of grips, the ‘power grips’ wherewith something is grasped and often engulfed with the entire hand, and the ‘precision grips’ wherewith human beings’ opposable thumbs are aligned with one or more fingertips. Neuroscientific research shows that power grips in their typical uses in fast and forceful actions stimulate temporal sensitivity, whereas precision grasps in their characteristic use in highly specific tasks stimulate spatial sensitivity. (Reed and Park, p. 104) There are additionally an indeterminate number of other grips that fall outside these categories, such as the hook grip that we use for carrying a pail’s handle, or the seductive ‘scissor’ grip used to hold a cigarette.

Much of the world’s art-making is of course inconceivable without the precision grips needed to make and handle the instruments of inscribing, marking, and painting. But a more conceptually fundamental point is that the structure of the human hand permits, as Raymond Tallis put it, “not merely a wider range of grips, of modes of prehension, but a limitless varied range of grips, each of which can be customized for the needs of the moment” (Tallis (2003), p. 35). Further, in ordinary human activities and tasks we change grips; one opens the jar (power grip with both hands), holds the jar (power grip) and grasps the spoon (precision grip), and ladles the peanut butter into one’s mouth. The use of the hand involves both seemingly endless variety oriented towards accomplishing tasks, and sequentiality of heterogeneous kinds of grips. As some authors have noted, both of these features are oddly language-like, with the former corresponding to that basic feature of language stressed by Chomsky, the infinite uses of finite elements, and the latter corresponding to something like syntax, the meaning-bearing ordering of elements.

     In thinking about the ways that the body’s hands and their uses induce the conceptualization of lived space, neuroscientists have introduced the distinction between ‘peripersonal’ and ‘extrapersonal’ space. ‘Peripersonal’ space “refers to the space near and surrounding the body and is the region in which our visual system and the body can best interact to perform actions. It includes the space near the hands, or ‘peri-hand space’, as well as reachable space, and potentially even space just outside body reach.” Correlatively, ‘extrapersonal’ space “refers to the far space away from the body and well beyond reach.” (ibid, p. 101) Whereas perception of extrapersonal space is typically restricted to the distal senses of sight and hearing, peripersonal space is perceptually multimodal in further involving haptic and proprioceptive awareness. This point will later in this book show itself to be of great importance in the formation of artistic meaning in the visual arts. Even at this early point one senses how this point opens the possibility of explaining the old and seemingly unsustainable point that there are distinctive ‘tactile’ values in painting, especially in the depiction of gesture and in the use of both invoked and actual textures. Consider the use of the hands in Caravaggio’s ‘The Supper at Emmaus’ (1601):

     The other two major categories of uses of the hand, exploration and communication, will be dealt with at length later, the former in the consideration of the major art forms of drawing, painting, and sculpture, the latter in the coming sections on gesture and language. On the latter I’ll note here a point a point suggested by the philosopher Colin McGinn, that when the hand is used for purposes outside the peripersonal zone, it tends “to become modified into a weakened or diluted version of its original, thereby becoming more symbolic than actual. We thus get “action at a distance,” as the original action is performed at some distance from the object of the action, in stylized form.” (McGinn, p. 55)

    A final point, another one that will lead to a key element in our conceptualization of artistic meaning, arises in reflecting upon the relation between the hand and the body as a whole. The anthropologist John Tooby and the evolutionary biologist Irven DeVore note that “organisms are systems of co-evolved adaptations; a change in one feature resonates through the system, changing other features in the adaptive constellation” (quoted in Tallis, pp. 269-70). The evidence suggests that the human brain, the human hand, and tool-use co-evolve, and that evolutionary changes are not associated with increased visual acuity, but rather with developing manipulative precision (ibid, p. 37). Within the emergent infinite variety of grips, the human being develops a greater sense of alternatives: tasks might be accomplished by means of this or that grip; new imaginative possibilities arise in reverie on an expanding range of uses of a certain grip. Given Tooby’s and DeVore’s point about how changes resonate through the organism, the emergent agentive sense of the hand and its possibilities retroacts upon the prior conception of the body; the body too becomes more an agent of manipulation, exploration, and communication, more a thing of possibilities. If so, then it’s plausible to think that with each of our upcoming resources—gesture, artifactuality and technics, language—there will similarly be retroactive re-conceptualizations and enrichments of the prior resources. Additionally, this opens the door, so it seems to me, to understanding the difficult but perennial intuition that there is something inexhaustible about artistic meaning. Making sense of this intuition will be the final and hardest problem of this book.—Next, starting with McGinn’s point mentioned above, I turn to consideration of gesture.

References and Works Consulted:

Matthew Fulkerson, The First Sense: A Philosophical Study of Human Touch (2014)

Colin McGinn, Prehension (2015)

Chris McManus, Right Hand, Left Hand: The Origins of Asymmetry in Brains, Bodies, Atoms, and Cultures (2002)

John Napier, Hands (1980)

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

Catherine L. Reed and George D. Park, “Functional actions of hands and tools influence attention in peripersonal space”, in The World at Our Fingertips (2021), ed. de Vignemont, Serino, Wong, and Farnè

Frank R. Wilson, The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture (1999)

The World in an Eye, First Draft 5.4: Structural Aspects of Body Schemas

In my previous post I introduced Joseph Grady’s account of how basic events—the innumerable, life-long experiences of phenomena such as resistance, weight, effort, etc., etc.—give rise to an indeterminately large range of basic scenes, concepts, and metaphors that can plausibly be thought to be shared by human beings by virtue of their embodiment, their self-motion and activities, and their common perceptual and cognitive capacities. As part of the common resources of human life, these scenes, concepts, and metaphors can further function as part of the content of the projections that we are seeking as part of the basis of artistic meaningfulness. In this post I’ll introduce a more determinate and detailed sense of these common resources as presented in the writings of the cognitive linguist George Lakoff and the pragmatist philosopher Mark Johnson, first in their path-breaking book of 1980 Metaphors We Live By, and then extensively developed in many books and papers since. I’ll focus on the account given in their most recent collaborative book, Philosophy in the Flesh of 1999, a book that treats Grady’s work as foundational to their own.

      First, an anecdote: Once in a long philosophical conversation with the great Russian poet Aleksei Parshchikov, he suddenly said, “John, I must ask you: which is more important, space . . . or time?” I was of course flummoxed. Some philosophical titles leapt to mind--Being and Time, Time and the Other, Time and Free Will—so I thought ‘What the hell’ and said “Time”. Aleksei sadly looked at me and said, “Yes, many people think that, but the right answer is Space.” Parshchikov’s claim seems to tally with the results of cognitive linguistics, where time is conceptualized in (the more fundamental) terms or concepts of space; as Lakoff and Johnson put it, “All of our understandings of time are relative to other concepts such as motion, space, and events”, and “Most of our understanding of time is a metaphorical version of our understanding of motion in space.” (Lakoff and Johnson (1999), pp. 137 and 139). The authors identify a basic level of spatial relations, which can then be combined to create more complex spatial conceptions, as well as metaphorically projected to conceptualize other basic concepts, such as time or the self, as well as projected as part of complex conceptualizations generally. Our concern ultimately will be with how these projections give rise to and enrich artistic meaning.

     Lakoff and Johnson’s writings, individually and together, contain many hundreds of pages of explication and analysis of the fundamental conceptualizations of spatiality and their employment. I limit myself here to a brief sketch of their basic claims and conceptualizations. With regard to basic spatial relations and their conceptual elaboration, they argue as follows: There are for human beings a range of elementary spatial relations, including those articulated with terms like ‘in’, ‘to’, ‘above’, and ‘in contact with’. These elementary relations are pre-linguistic, in the sense that they are partially acquired by infants and young children prior to the onset of language, and developed along the routes laid out by Grady. These elementary relations admit of combination with each other and further conceptualizations to produce more complex spatial relations; so ‘into’ combines the elementary relations of ‘in’ and ‘to’, and ‘on’ synthesizes ‘above’ and ‘in contact with’ with the tactile conceptualization ‘is supported by’. (1999, p. 31) Elementary spatial relations also themselves “have a further internal structure consisting of an image schema, a profile, and a trajector-landmark structure.”  (a) ‘Image schemas’ are “relatively simple structures that constantly recur in our everyday bodily experience”, such as containers and paths, and may include orientations (such as up-down and front-back) and relations (such as part-whole and center-periphery) (Lakoff (1987), p. 267). (b) ‘Profile’ is synonymous with ‘highlighting’ and refers to the way in which different terms and conceptualizations pick out one aspect of the relevant image-schema as relatively important (Lakoff and Johnson (1999), p. 33). This is most readily explicated together with the next feature.

(c) ‘Trajector-landmark structure’ is given most clearly in the basic image schema of source-path-goal, visualized as a line with a dot on one end (the source or point of origin) and an arrow at the other (the goal or pointing to the goal). The conceptualization ‘to’ profiles (i.e. highlights) the goal, while ‘from’ profiles the source. (ibid)

     There are three further features of image schemas that pervade their employment in human life, and so unsurprisingly will play a great range of roles in the production of artistic meaning. Image schemas are topological in the sense that they can be expanded, shrunk, or deformed to a degree and still retain their identity as a particular schema (ibid, p. 33).

Second, image schemas have “built-in spatial “logics”” that permit automatic inferences. So if one container is nested within a larger container, then we can automatically infer that something within the smaller container is also within the larger. A third feature, and one that will prove to be of the greatest importance in the mechanisms of artistic meaning in visual art, is that image schemas are cross-modal with regard to the senses, that is, they do not solely arise from, nor are they limited in application to, any one sense (vision, hearing, touch, etc.) (ibid, p. 32)

     Following Grady’s, Lakoff’s, and Johnson’s accounts, one sees that Image schemas in every way presuppose human embodiment. The employment of image schemas straightforwardly involves the projection of the human body in the particularly prominent instance of front-back relations. We automatically project such relations onto objects in light of our characteristic interactions with them; the front of a television set is where we characteristically look, the front of a house is where we characteristically enter and where the visual presentation is characteristically maximized, etc. (ibid, p. 34). And we have already seen in Michael Podro’s account of Rembrandt how front-back orientation is invoked, multiplied, and played with in an instance of maximal artistic meaningfulness.

      This completes the initial presentation of how the body figures as a durable and species-wide source of artistic meaningfulness. In the next post I begin to present a second great resource, a specific part of the body: the human hand as something capable of distinctive kinds of grasping, gesturing, and pointing.

 References:

Joseph Grady, Foundations of Meaning: Primary Metaphors and Primary Scenes (1997), Dissertation in Department of Linguistics, UC Berkeley

George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (1987)

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980)

--Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (1999)

Michael Podro, Depiction (1999)

The World in an Eye, First Draft, Part 5.3: What is Projection?

      After a foray of appreciation in David Graeber’s account of the contemporary art world, I return to the first draft of my book in the philosophy of the visual arts. In my previous posts I began the exploration of the sources and mechanisms of artistic meaningfulness in the human body, especially as conceptualized by Edmund Husserl in Ideas II, and ended by indicating that I’ll seek the basis of artistic meaningfulness is ‘projection’, and will try to develop the relevant conceptualization of projection through consideration of recent work in pragmatist philosophy and especially cognitive linguistics. To begin to get the topic into focus, I start with an extended quotation from the key and much-discussed section of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception entitled “The Spatiality of the Body and its Motricity:

“Within the busy world in which concrete movement unfolds, abstract movement hollows out a zone of reflection and of subjectivity, it superimposes a virtual or human space over physical space. Concrete movement is thus centripetal, whereas abstract movement is centrifugal; the first takes place within being or the actual, the second takes place within the possible or within non-being; the first adheres to a given background, the second itself sets up its own background. The normal function that makes abstract movement possible is a function of “projection” by which the subject of movement organizes before himself a free space in which things that do not exist naturally can take on a semblance of existence.”  (Merleau-Ponty, p. 114)

     In the extended quotation Merleau-Ponty is tentatively exploring how to describe the fundamental elements wherewith a human being does not live, move, and act simply as a kind of reflex to an indifferent outer world, but rather does so always within a space of possibility (I do not think it is possible to describe and evoke such primordial features of human existence without recourse to metaphors and quasi-poetic expressions (‘space of possibility’), and in any case I won’t attempt to). Merleau-Ponty’s way of putting it here, by contraposing concrete movement within a given background to abstract movement against a background that the agent seems to create for herself, seems to make him vulnerable to the philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s forceful objection. Adopting from Aristotle the conception of the senses as kinetic operations (as mentioned in a previous post), and Husserl’s analysis of bodily kinesthesia (likewise discussed in an earlier post), Sheets-Johnstone claims that Merleau-Ponty misses the fundamental phenomenon of what she calls ‘primary animation’, the sense that from infancy human beings orient themselves to the world, sense objects, situations, and environments, and grasp things all through self-movement. (Sheets-Johnstone (2011), pp. 209-13) Merleau-Ponty’s formulation suggests that at the most basic level of analysis there is the embodied person engaged in concrete movements, and abstract movements, their background and their possible environments supervene upon that primordial layer through a process of projection. As Sheets-Johnstone puts it, Merleau-Ponty affirms a basic bodily unity with the world, but “a unity achieved not by way of constituting consciousness, that is, not by way of building up of knowledge through experience, but by an already intact and functioning “motor intentionality”—a body that “projects” itself into the world” (ibid, pp. 210-11).

     It seems to me that Sheets-Johnstone is right in thinking that Merleau-Ponty’s formulation here almost irresistibly suggests that he understands concrete movement as basic and abstract movement as derived, but it seems likewise that it is open to a follower of Merleau-Ponty to treat concrete and abstract movement as equiprimordial, that is, that there is never concrete action (something conceptually richer than movement) without a sense of possibility, that is, a sense of alternatives and of different envisioned outcomes. Further, one could add the point (much stressed by the philosopher Charles Taylor in his various accounts of expressivism (see my earlier blog post on Taylor’s recent book)) that the agent gives itself further definition, an elaborated sense of who she is, in projection. Put alternatively, one could say that the agent who projects is not quite the same person, and does not quite live in the same world, as she was and did prior to the projection. If one adds these two points to Merleau-Ponty’s account—that concrete and abstract movement/action are equiprimordial, and that the agent gives further definition to herself in projection—then Merleau-Ponty’s account seems at least consistent with accounts of animation such as Sheets-Johnstone’s, and accounts that begin with the embodied agent-in-an-environment-and-world such as Eugene Gendlin’s.

     Can anything determinate be said about ‘projection’ beyond the sense given by Merleau-Ponty and modified here in response to Sheets-Johnstone? More precisely what are the tactile-kinesthetic invariants invoked by Sheets-Johnstone (as discussed in an earlier post) and what role do they play in forming the bases of artistic meaning? To answer these questions, I turn now to work in cognitive linguistics and pragmatic philosophy from recent decades, starting with a dissertation written by Joseph Grady in UC Berkeley’s Department of Linguistics in the late 1990s. Grady starts from a question posed by the path-breaking work of the cognitive linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson in their book Metaphors We Live By. Lakoff and Johnson noticed and analyzed a remarkable phenomenon: that there are an indeterminately large number of basic metaphors that pervasively structure human thought. Striking examples of such metaphors include ‘Up is More/Down is Less’ (e.g. ‘prices went up’) and ‘Temporal Orientation is Spatial Orientation’ (‘we’ve put that behind us’; ‘we’re looking forward to our vacation’). Grady asks how such metaphors are possible, and how is it that they are pervasive and automatically understood. He suggests the following analysis:

1. Human beings share a range of cognitive abilities and structures. Likewise, there are an indeterminately large number of basic events that occur routinely in everyday human life; Grady’s examples are “we often lift objects, we often see particular colors, we often bend our knees, we often perceive similarities between objects, we often move from one location to another, we often gain information through visual observation of a scene” (Grady, p. 20).

2. Some of these basic events become salient for us because they relate to our everyday actions and goals; such events matter to us. So, for example, the basic event of pushing something heavy matters because it is part of a sequence of actions wherewith one attempts to roll a boulder up a hill. Such basic events are salient for agents under particular descriptions, with specific granularity and from particular points-of-view. So there is, say, I Sisyphus rolling this immense boulder up a hill in Hades. The basic event, conceptualized as part of a typical narrative, of a particular granularity, and from a particular point of view, then gives rise to what Grady calls ‘the primary scene’, which “are minimal (temporally-delimited) episodes of subjective experience, characterized by tight correlations between physical circumstance and cognitive response. They are universal elements of human experience, defined by basic cognitive mechanisms and abilities, which relate in some salient sense to goal-oriented interaction with the world” (p. 24).

3. Because basic events and primary scenes occur frequently, they come to be associated with other experiential elements that co-occur. For example, heaviness in the primary scene mentioned comes to be associated with the sense of straining. When such associations occur automatically and as it were below the level of conscious awareness, Grady says that there is ‘conceptual binding’.

4. Given primary conceptual binding, with its pre- or un-conscious aspects, there will be subsequent learning processes wherein the clusters of elements bound conceptually come to be distinguished and perhaps articulately so. One will, for example, come to realize that not all heaviness is bound to a sense of strain; the fifty-pound weights that I strain against in the circuit room will be as nothing to a weight-lifter. Grady calls such elaborations of primary scenes ‘deconflation’ (p. 25).

5. Grady is now in a position to make sense of the basic metaphors that Lakoff and Johnson noticed. Human beings seek to extend their understanding to new situations. In doing so, they correlate their primary senses with other senses (pp. 25-6). It is this correlation, so I’ll argue, that gives determinate sense and structure to the unanalyzed ‘projection’ posited by Merleau-Ponty, and likewise to Sheets-Johnstone’s conception of tactile-kinesthetic invariants. The ‘projective’ correlation of tactile-kinesthetic invariants will for us form the basis of the possibility of artistic meaningfulness.

     In my next post I’ll go into much greater depth of the character of these invariants, as conceptualized in particular in the work of Lakoff and Johnson.

References:

Aristotle, De Anima/On the Soul (mid-4th century B. C. E.)

Eugene Gendlin, A Process Model (2017)

Joseph Grady, Foundations of Meaning: Primary Metaphors and Primary Scenes (1997), Dissertation in Department of Linguistics, UC Berkeley

Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy II (1913-28)

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

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980)

--Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (1999)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (2012)

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement (2011)

Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment (2024)

David Graeber on the Art World, Part Two: The Possible Coin of Our Dreams

After an interlude briefly considering an aspect of regional art worlds, I return to David Graeber’s account of the contemporary art world. As seen previously, Graeber treats the contemporary art world as (a) a social fact, the conception of which has entered commonsense as an affiliation of artists, critics, gallerists, museum professionals, collectors, and interested amateurs;  (b) as a social mechanism of valuation, one that uses the inherited Romantic ideology of the artist as genius to create the sense that art is scarce and which accordingly is particularly attractive to the beneficiaries of the so-called financialization of capitalism that emerged in the 1970s, who can acquire social prestige and expensive goods through their participation in the art world; and (c) as a historical phenomenon marked by (i) its origins in Romantic ideologies, and (ii) the failure of the heroic avant-gardes of the 1910s and 1920s to sustain a fruitful link between art and politics, and so leaving the art world in its current depoliticized state. I suspect that many people familiar with the art world would broadly agree with Graeber’s conception, although perhaps with different emphases and disagreements about details. However, there is a further major aspect to Graeber’s account, one that I only alluded to in my first post, that seemingly strongly differentiates his account from the commonsense conception, or from other sophisticated accounts. I’ll now consider this fourth characteristic, which is Graeber’s conception of the ever-available possibility of collective transformation of the art world from its current state into something that a sane person might wish to be a part of.

     Graeber’s sense of the art world as something open to transformation follows, so I’ll suggest, from some of his basic theoretical conceptions and commitments. His first and really only major theoretical statement is his book Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams from 2001, and evidently bearing the marks of a re-written doctoral dissertation. Graeber’s general appreciation for the work of his doctoral supervisor, the eminent anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, is well-known, but the book reveals more specific intellectual indebtedness to the work of two great but perhaps less widely known anthropologists, Nancy Munn and Terence Turner. Explicitly following Munn, Graeber writes that “Value emerges in action; it is the process by which a person’s invisible “potency”—their capacity to act—is transformed into concrete, visible forms . . . Value, then, is the way people represent the importance of their own actions to themselves”, and that value “is the way people who could do almost anything (including, in the right circumstances, creating entirely new sorts of social relation) assess the importance of what they do, in fact, do, as they are doing it”  (Graeber (2001), pp. 45 and 47). One immediately notes how Graeber’s characterization of the artworld, especially characteristic (b) [the social process of evaluation] and (d) [the inherent possibility of transformation] are foreshadowed in Munn’s thought. From Turner Graeber adopts the methodological insistence that alienation and hierarchy be seen not as natural facts or inevitable aspects of the human condition, but rather as historical phenomena always subject to modification (see, for example, p. 75), again foreshadowing the art world’s characteristic (d)). Generalizing from the work of all three of his anthropological guides, he asserts that human societies cannot be approached as ahistorical things, but rather as a total social processes (p. 76), which, as systems of actions, are constitutively historical in the sense that action always involves some sense of an alternative: things could be done this way, but also that way. And, as noted above, for Graeber this is just another way of saying that human societies are historical phenomena: “Insofar as any system of actions is also historical, it is in a permanent condition of transformation, or, at the very least, potential transformation.” (p. 249)

      For Graeber, this historical sense of society as a total social process of actions immediately introduces the sense of freedom, in the sense that for a choice of action to be an actual choice (and not, say, a kind of unrecognized compulsion) agents must in some sense be ‘free’ to act one way rather than another. Graeber derives two final methodological points from this: First, there must always be the possibility of resistance to whatever dominant kinds of meaning a society proffers (p. 89; many readers will note the closeness of Graeber’s conception here to that given in the later work of Michel Foucault). Second, while a human society may rightly be thought of as a total social process, there is no one aspect, no field, no institution, no social sphere, which can impose its particular kind of meaningfulness upon a society as a whole, at least not ever without the possibility of external contestation from other aspects, nor of internal contestation from its own members. So the fourth characteristic of the art world, its possibility of transformation, issues directly and almost of necessity from Graeber’s theoretical commitments.

     All other accounts of the art world known to me are silent on this transformative possibility. In the philosopher George Dickie’s initial formulation in 1974, the art world was an institution whose distinctive activity is conferring artistic status upon a subset of the world’s artifacts. Dickie’s proposal received fierce criticism from quite a few philosophers of art, many of which criticisms Dickie accepted. In his heavily revised conception in 1984, he took over the philosopher Monroe Beardsley’s distinction between ‘institution-types’ (“such as tool-making, storytelling, marriage, or the like”) and ‘institution-tokens’ (“the University of Illinois, the United States government, and the like”), and asserted that in the philosophically relevant sense the art world is an institution-type. Accordingly, he writes that “what I now mean by the institutional approach is the view that a work of art is art because of the position it occupies within a cultural practice, which is of course in Beardsley’s terminology an institution-type”. Dickie adds a further distinction from the philosophy Jeffrey Wieand between ‘Action-institutions’ (“promising and the like”) and Person-institutions (“organizations which behave as quasi-persons or agents, as, for example, the Catholic Church and General Motors do”), with the art world now conceived as an Action-institution (Dickie (1984), pp. 52-3). So on his revised conception, the art world understood as a set of persons does not confer artistic status. His formal statement of the theory is twofold: “An artworld system is a framework for the presentation of a work of art by an artist to an art world public” (p. 82); and “The artworld is the totality of all artworld systems” (p. 81). This seems to be a case where the initial formulation of a philosophical thesis is interesting, exciting, and false, and the revised formulation is uninteresting, trivial, and true, or at least plausible. In any case the distinctive features of the contemporary art world disappear from view in the service of academic paper-churning.

     On this topic one might well expect more from sociologists than from philosophy professors. I cannot here so much as summarize Pierre Bourdieu’s relevant account, but I note that Bourdieu primarily addresses what he calls the field of artistic production, and the foci of his extended analyses are mid-to-late literary and artistic production in France, especially with regard to Flaubert and Manet. The standard account of the art world surely comes from the sociologist Howard Becker, who explicitly rejects Bourdieu’s account of the artistic field “as if it were a field of forces in physics rather than a lot of people doing something together”, with the members of the art world caricatured as having relations with each other that are “exclusively relations of domination, based in competition and conflict” (Becker (2008), p. 374). For Becker, the art world is rather not a closed unit, but rather “contains people, all sorts of people, who are in the middle of doing something that requires them to pay attention to each other, to take account consciously of the existence of others and to shape what they do in the light of what others do” (p. 375). Against the first version of Dickie’s institutional theory, Becker notes that it exaggerated the sense in which an art world allegedly confers art status; such ‘conferrals’ are regularly disputed from within the art world, and likewise attributions of quality and meaning to particular artworks. Further, Dickie (and Danto in his original essay) seem unclear as to whether there is a single art world, or multiple ones. In his positive account, Becker makes a great many observations that seem at least broadly consistent with Graeber’s account. He stresses the open-endedness of art worlds and the centrality of the phenomena of artistic careers and trajectories.  Becker explicitly addresses the fact that “Art worlds change continuously—sometimes gradually, sometimes quite dramatically” (p. 300), and considers a number of historical examples of emergent art worlds (especially jazz). There have been, Becker asserts, many attempts to create new art worlds, with very occasional success. The success of an attempt to create a new art world needs a new kind of art, a new audience for that art, networks of people sufficiently devoted to that art to develop media for critical discussion, and finally a legitimizing history of that new kind of art that places it among exiting art forms (p. 339).

     Does Graeber’s account add anything to Becker’s careful and illuminating discussion? Perhaps. If it does, it concerns Graeber’s employment of a richer conception of reflective freedom, and this is highlighted in his fourth characteristic of art worlds. One way of putting the contrast would be to note that Becker is an academic American sociologist of institutions, while Graeber is an Anarchist anthropologist and philosopher of freedom. As an anthropologist, Graeber focuses on the (alleged) tight connection between art markets and scarcity of artistic goods, and then the deployment of scarcity as a legitimating element of hierarchies internal and external to art worlds. Becker also is unconcerned with the sense of history in art worlds outside of the empirical phenomena of emergence, decay, and the creation of histories as it were internal to art forms. Graeber by contrast treats broad-scale historical learning from art worlds’ successes and failures, and is particularly concerned with the ‘revolutionary’ moment of Soviet arts in the late1910s-early 1920s. Malevich’s vision of a revolutionary art may have ‘failed’ in the sense that it did not by itself create a sustainable artistic style or a new art world, but it did, along with other elements of the Russian avant-gardes, give a range of hitherto non-artistic agents—workers, suburbanites, the rural poor—something of the tools they needed to join in collective artistic activities (Graeber (2024), p. 298).

Likewise the so-called ‘Proletkult’ movement, which attempted to build a new proletarian art and supporting institutions, effloresced shortly after the revolution but was already in severe decline by 1922 (Mally, p. 221); nonetheless it left the Soviet Union with a new and durable kind of institution, the so-called ““House of Culture” where anyone can spend their free time on anything from Go clubs to drawing and singing lessons, from puppet theater to painting classes” (G3, p. 8).

These Houses might well be seen as the products of a kind of collective reflection unknown in Becker’s account, namely, the capacity to reflect upon current institutions, and then propose new sorts of institutions as successors to existing relatively unfree and exclusive ones. So out of his concern for imaginative possibilities of practical freedom, Graeber enriches our conception of the art world with a richer historical sense and a new concern for transformation.

References:

Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (2008)

Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art (1996)

--The Field of Cultural Production (1993)

Arthur Danto, ‘The Artworld’, in Journal of Philosophy (1964)

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

---The Art Circle (1984)

Nika Dubrovsky and David Graeber, ‘Another Art World, Pts. 1-3: Art Communism and Artificial Scarcity; Utopia of Freedom as a Market Value; Policing and Symbolic Order’, in e-flux journal, (2019-20), issues 102, 104, and 113

David Graeber, Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (2001)

--‘The Sadness of Post-Workerism’, in Revolutions in Reverse: Essays Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination (2011)

--The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . . (2024)

Nancy Munn, The Fame of Gawa (1986

Terence Turner, The Fire of the Jaguar (2017)

Lynn Mally, Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia (1990)

Interlude: The Grandeur and Misery of the Bay Area Art World--Remarks on Doug Hall's book

     As I continue to work on the second part of my appreciative account of David Graeber on the art world, I have received This is Doug Hall: A Memoir, by the prominent Bay Area artist and teacher Doug Hall. I instantly was reminded of an important fact about the art world, namely, that while in many contexts it makes sense to speak of the art world (that is, in the singular), there are likewise many contexts where it makes sense to speak of artworlds (in the plural), since part of what makes up an artworld are the webs of affiliation, formal and informal, among its members, the artists, gallerists, museum professionals, critics, and collectors. So in many contexts it makes sense to distinguish, say, the New York art world from the Los Angeles art world, and both from the Bay Area art world. Such distinctions also play a role in hierarchies of valuation; the art worlds of New York, Los Angeles, and London carry greater prestige, and non-coincidentally contain larger fortunes, than those of Seattle or the Bay Area. To my mind Hall’s contribution to the Bay Area art world is immense, both with his art (installations, videos, and performances) and his teaching (primarily at the defunct San Francisco Art Institute, but also more briefly at the California College of the Arts). After a first chapter largely covering his life from earliest childhood through college, the book chronicles his time at art school, his prominent performance and video work in the 1970s as part of the small group T. R. Uthco, his videos and installations in the 1980s, his large photographs especially in the 1990s and early 2000s, and a small number of video works in the past two decades. The book also discusses the painful incident of receiving a highly negative review from the critic Roberta Smith in the New York Times, where Smith pans Hall’s work The Terrible Uncertainty of the Thing Described (a work that prominently features a tesla coil regularly discharging lightning) [fun fact: I helped Hall install the work initially in Pittsburg, Boston, and San Francisco, and wrote the manual for setting up the installation and operating the coil]. Smith wrote that “There must be a name for a spectacle, apart from amusement park rides and certain horror movies, that reduces the spectator to speechless fear—but it may not be art” (Smith quoted on p. 209). Might this indicate something about the Bay Area art world, and more generally how the relatively low prestige of regional art worlds is instituted and sustained?

     In the past few years a couple of incidents have raised issues about the character of the Bay Area art world. One was an article in the New York Times that noted the closing of nationally prominent galleries in the Bay Area, and which accordingly suggested that the local art world was in decline, at least financially. What was instructive about this page-filling bit of fluff was the response: articles appeared righteously responding and insisting that the Bay Area art world was thriving. What was the evidence for the counter-claim? It seemed to be two things: prominent gallerists, especially Catharine Clark of the eponymous gallery, claimed that their sales were just dandy, thank you; and more interestingly assertions were made to the effect that the Bay Area art world consisted in part of distinct ‘communities’ characterized by gender, sexual orientation, and/or ethnicity, and that sales of expensive artworks played no role in the health of such communities. The other incident was the closing of the long moribund San Francisco Art Institute, which occasioned a great deal of public wailing and reminiscing about its alleged glory days. Having been officially harassed, slandered, denigrated, vilified, suspended from teaching and laid off by the Art Institute for having objected to their promotion of animal abuse (specifically, the animal abuse videos of the artist Adel Abdessemed, which were shown in their gallery in February 2008), I somehow could not manage any tears. What did strike me was how the Bay Area art world immediately generated a kind of social myth about the greatness of the Art Institute.

Nothing, I mean nothing, was said publicly about its well-documented corruption—not just promotion of animal abuse and harassment of its faculty, but also its nepotism, tawdry and trivilializing official conception of art, its anti-academic, anti-labor, and anti-union practices, its steep decline in national rankings in the 21st century (from its customary ranking in or near to top 10, to 35th in 2008, to 50th in 2020), and its astoundingly high rate of students who left after one year (the official statistics of the Department of Education show a rate of student retention at only 50% for the decade 2010-20, whereas comparable West Coast art schools ranged from the low 70s-mid-80s%).

     I am very glad to have the opportunity to consider and remember Hall’s work. One of his works was fundamental to my introduction to contemporary art, and indeed incited a life-long interest, namely Seven Chapters from the Life of . . . (A Soap Opera), performed over seven consecutive nights, with the settings of the performances left in place for a few weeks afterwards as sculptural installations.

      But the book also, and certainly inadvertently, offers some sense of the kinds of self-deceptions, evasions, and despair of second-class prestige that afflict the regional art world. One chapter is devoted to Hall’s teaching, which was noteworthy for its engagement with difficult philosophical and theoretical texts (especially those of Walter Benjamin; I myself gave a guest lecture in one of Hall’s MFA seminars on Benjamin in (I think) 1987). I note three peculiar instances of a kind of myth-making there:

#1: Hall describes the relationships among the faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute: “our faculty, although holding certain principles in common, differed in how we approached our own work and teaching. Relationships could become strained over ideas or just personal conflicts. But for the most part, we got along or at least remained civil and respectful of one another” (p. 120). Really? One of the faculty members of Hall’s Performance/Video Department was the artist Sharon Grace, who told me several times that when she tried to speak at departmental meetings in the 1980s, she was shouted down by another faculty member, Tony Labat, with the words “Shut up, bitch!” A peculiar kind of civility!

#2: In discussing the issues in and difficulties of teaching so-called critique seminars where students present their work for discussion by the teacher and their fellow students, Hall focuses on the problem of judgments of quality or ‘good/bad’. He suggests that one source of the difficulties is the fact that artists work across and among different genres and media (“sculpture, video, performance”). In thinking about this, he accepts as a basis for discussion the conception of art that ‘art is a creative act that changes something’, and notes that this characterization of art was made by his 11 year-old grandson (p.124) Is there any connection between the anti-intellectualism of the Art Institute and the willingness of a teacher to adopt a pre-adolescent conception?

#3. Hall describes teaching a class “[i]n the early 1980s” (p. 128). During the class a student has a panic attack, and Hall spoke with her afterwards. He says that she was triggered by some word, she knew not which, and this made him curious about the “magical potential of language”. He says he recalled an early essay by Walter Benjamin on the mute language of objects (p. 130). Now, having known Hall well in the 1980s, I’m pretty sure he did not then know German fluently, and as certain as I can be that he did not read Benjamin in the original German. But the essay he cites was not published in English until 1986. What sort of magic language is this?

References:

Walter Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such, and on the Language of Man’ (originally 1916), in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (1986)

David Graeber, ‘The Sadness of Post-Workerism’, in Revolutions in Reverse: Essays Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination (2011)

--The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . . (2024)

Doug Hall, This is Doug Hall: A Memoir (2024)

David Graeber on the Art World: Problems and Possibilities

A couple of weeks ago there was a national election in the United States, and since then a rare cheering event has the publication of a collection of essays by the great anthropological thinker and anarchist David Graeber. Most of the pieces were previously published, and I had read almost all of those shortly after their publication. Shortly before his death in 2020, Graeber, together with his wife Nika Dubrovsky, had written a three-part essay for the contemporary art journal e-flux, and at the time those pieces, together Graeber’s earlier essay ‘The Sadness of Post-Workerism’, struck me as offering a novel and deeply insightful account of the contemporary art world. The first part of essay in e-flux is included in the new collection, and so as a tribute to Graeber, to my mind one of the most interesting and imaginative thinkers of the past thirty years, I’d like to return to his account of the artworld.

     What is the artworld? My experience in teaching and conversations is that many people are surprised to learn how recently the term was coined, as well as the vicissitudes of the term’s early history. The genealogy is straight-forward and well-documented: In 1964 the philosopher and former Abstract Expressionist woodblock artist Arthur Danto returned to New York City from a year in Paris. He entered a gallery and saw the initial exhibition of Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, which consisted of seemingly random stacks of boxes, painted with stencils so as to reproduce the appearance of the commercial boxes sold in stores. Danto was struck by the thought that Warhol’s Brillo Boxes were visually identical with the commercial ones, yet the former were artworks, and the latter weren’t. Why the difference? In an imaginative fancy of strained metaphors, Danto proposed that there was an entity he called ‘the artworld’ that consisted of an ‘atmosphere of theory’, that the theories in the artworld changed historically, and that the then contemporaneous application of these theories yielded the judgments of which boxes were and weren’t artworks.

      This is a peculiar incident in cultural and intellectual history, if for no other reason than the fact that Warhol’s boxes are in no way visually identical to the commercial ones. Anyone with normal eyesight and standing within ten feet of the Warhols can see that the paint is applied quickly and unevenly. But no fact has ever stopped a philosophical theory. If one sets aside the prima facie implausibility of Danto’s theory, a few questions immediately arise: To whom are the artworld’s theories addressed? Who cares about them? Who holds these theories, and who uses them to decide whether the artifacts are artworks or not? A few years later the philosopher George Dickie proposed that the artworld is an institution consisting of people, and so the sociological and currently common-sensical conception of the artworld was born. Dickie’s theory was quickly subjected to withering philosophical criticism, but the idea became entrenched that there is (a) a social entity called the artworld, (b) the members of this world are affiliated in countless ways formally (in institutions such as museums, galleries, and art schools) and informally (through social networks and family connections, cocktail and dinner parties, galas, etc.), and (c) they perform, individually and/or collectively, two kinds of activities: deciding what counts as art, and determining the quality and value of artworks.

     David Graeber’s analysis of the artworld is of a piece with his general anthropological views on the concepts of value, hierarchy, violence, and authority, and on methods of institutional analysis (I’ll consider his broader framework in a follow-up post). He accepts that there has been (at least since the early twentieth-century) and is something rightly called ‘the art world’, and whose ‘apparatus’ he flippantly characterizes as consisting of “critics, journals, gallery owners, dealers, flashy magazines and the people who leaf through them and argue about them in factories-turned-chichi-cafes in gentrifying neighborhoods”.  (G1, p. 93—I’ll refer to the earlier essay as ‘G1’, and the later pieces originally published in e-flux journal as ‘G2’ (as published in the new book), ‘G3’, and ‘G4’). He seems to think of the contemporary art world as quite stable and durable, and very largely (though, as we shall see soon, not entirely) continuous with the art world after the rapid decline of avant-garde movements after Dadaism. The most prominent ideological feature of the contemporary art world is its seemingly intractable belief in the Romantic conception of the valuable kind of artist as a ‘genius’ who single-handedly creates individual works of great artistic merit. These works in turn merit their high prices, both because of their artistic greatness but also and especially because of their scarcity. (G1, p. 96; G2, p. 291; G3, p. 01; G4, p. 01) This entrenched ideology of genius sits uneasily with two other aspects of the artworld. First, everyone recognizes that art, broadly construed, is also a kind of regular and routine production of artifacts, and so not obviously something that is only produced rarely by geniuses. Typically, when this broader conception is mobilized, the relevant term is ‘the arts’ (in the plural; the singular is reserved for the genius-conception). Second, there is a second Romantic inheritance in the art world, one that insists that genius is also ‘popular’ because everyone is already in some sense engaged in artistic expression. Graeber quotes the poet and philosopher Novalis saying “Every person is meant to be an artist”, and that “[a]rtistic genius is simply “an exemplification and intensification of what human beings always do.”” (G2, p. 300) Graeber seems to think that this tension between the genius conception on the one hand, and the popular and broader conceptions on the other, is to a degree defused with a society-wide institutionalization of a certain hierarchy: the art world and its genius-products are at the pinnacle of a social pyramid of the arts, and the art-world’s self-flattering self-conception becomes the criterion of value and quality generally: the arts outside the art world are ‘rightly’ considered less valuable and less meaningful. As for the point of this whole structure, Graeber seems to accept something like Hegel’s remark that freedom is the principle of the modern world, and so the art world too is always a way of trying to work out conceptions of freedom appropriate for modern people in their various major spheres of life.

     For Graeber there are two important, distinctively contemporary, aspects to the artworld in its most recent manifestation, the aforementioned one whereby the contemporary art world is post-avant-garde, and one marking the shift in the role of finance and money. The most general feature of the artistic avant-gardes in their heroic phase from the mid-1910s  through the 1920s (from Duchamp’s first readymades through Surrealism) was one of exploring ‘radical possibilities’ through “perform[ing], in rapid succession, just about every subversive gesture it was possible to make: from white canvases to automatic writing, theatrical performances designed to incite riots, sacrilegious photo montage”, etc.

This heroic phase marked the last moment at which it was possible to plausibly claim that breaking all the rules . . . was itself, necessarily, a subversive political act as well.” (G1, p. 86) The passing of the heroic era left the artworld not only with a depoliticized conception of art, but also “a kind of permanent institutionalized crisis”, wherewith everything seemed an attempt to answer the unanswerable question ‘What is art?’ (G1, p. 93).

     The second, and relatively recent, change in the art world is its increasing ties to what is usually referred to as the financialization of capitalism since the 1970s. The patron and his bags of money has always been a central figure in the art world, but more recently he has largely appropriated to himself the ontological and epistemological tasks Dickie first assigned to the art world. Graeber writes that contemporary art “holds out a special appeal to financiers, I suspect, because it allows for a kind of short-circuit in the normal process of value-creation,” (G1, p.95), that is, the normal process that occurs through labor, rent, interest, speculation, and financialization. It is now financiers who “can baptize, consecrate, through money and thus turn into art” the relatively inexpensive materials that proletariat-like artists fashion into artifacts. Graeber wryly comments that “It is never clear, in this context, who exactly scamming whom.” (ibid)

     I take it that anyone familiar with the art world and its shenanigans—the extremist claims constantly made despite, or perhaps because of, their absurdity; the depoliticization; the prominence of finance-- recognizes at least the partial truth of Graeber’s account. Graeber’s account contains a further element typical of his thinking: the imaginative search for alternatives. In my next post I’ll try to say a bit more about how Graeber conceives of value, compare his account with some major alternatives from Pierre Bourdieu and Howard Becker, and discuss his suggestion of how the art world might be turned into something that a sane human being would wish to be part of.

References:

Arthur Danto, ‘The Artworld’, in Journal of Philosophy (1964)

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

Nika Dubrovsky and David Graeber, ‘Another Art World, Pts. 1-3: Art Communism and Artificial Scarcity; Utopia of Freedom as a Market Value; Policing and Symbolic Order’, in e-flux journal, (2019-20), issues 102, 104, and 113

David Graeber, ‘The Sadness of Post-Workerism’, in Revolutions in Reverse: Essays Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination (2011)

--The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . . (2024)

The World in an Eye, First Draft, 5.2: Conceptions of Body and the Idea of Tactile-Kinesthetic Invariants

     In previous posts I have argued that uncovering the capacities and resources that condition the possibility of artistic meaning in the visual arts can proceed on analogy with Richard Wollheim’s similar attempt with regard to specifically artistic meaning in painting practiced as an art. Wollheim argued that the core of such meaningfulness arises in artistic painting through representation, expression, and pleasure, as experienced by suitably attuned viewers of paintings. Each element is conditioned by the exercise of a certain perceptual capacity: representation requires the capacity for seeing-in, that is, for seeing something in a marked surface; expression requires the capacity for expressive perception, that is, to experience bits of nature or artifacts as embodying some mood, emotion, or feeling; pleasure (Wollheim calls it ‘visual delight’ (Wollheim (1987), p. 98)) arises, so Wollheim tentatively suggests, in the viewer’s shifting perspectives, from depicted subject to real subject, from figure to medium, from full-scale to detail. I have suggested that the conditions of artistic meaning in the visual arts are found first of all in human embodiment itself. But in what sense?

     Recall from Michael Podro’s account certain pervasive features of artistic meaning, its production and reception, that a basic mechanism of meaningfulness is an existential urgency to unify, especially to bring together in artifacts the semantic dimension, that is, what they’re about or their subject-matter, and their manner of presentation, which is first of all their material medium, and then broader elements such as orientation. And the motivation for the ceaseless operation of this mechanism is the archaic piece of human psychology that seeks to pursue similarity through difference. What does, or might, Aristotle with his hylomorphic account make of this?

      Perhaps the shortest route to Aristotle’s views, real or constructed, would be through his remarks on a ‘common sense’, especially at the beginning of the third book of De Anima. As with so much in that great book, there are tremendous conceptual challenges to understanding Aristotle, both because of the inherent difficulty of the topic, but also because of the compressed and seemingly ambiguous of the discussion. On one major line of interpretation, Aristotle claims in De Anima that the human psyche contains, along with the five canonical senses, a higher-order perceptual power, that is, a ‘common sense’, that grasps the ‘common sensibles’ of motion, shape, size, and pretty much any aspects of sensibles that are not the distinctive objects of the five senses. A different and recently prominent line of interpretation (for substantively different versions, compare Gregoric and Gendlin) urges that Aristotle’s remarks about a common sense aim to show that there is no such thing, and that the cognitive powers of grasping the common sensibles must be in some way located within the five senses themselves. Regardless of the variety of interpretations, Aristotle does say in a difficult line (425a19-20) that the senses are ‘one’, which must mean in part that in standard cases of object-perception the senses have a unified focus; for example, I perceive an apple qua single object as and via its color, shape, hardness, and smell. But there is nothing in De Anima, nor even in The Poetics, that attempts to come to grips with the kind of unity, or rather, striving for unity, that Podro has pinpointed as fundamental to artistic meaning.

     By contrast to Aristotle, the lines of reflection arising from Husserl’s account of embodiment do, I suggest, permit us to grasp the conditions and characteristic actions of artistic meaning at its most basic level. Here I follow a fundamental analysis from the philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, who surprisingly suggests that Husserl’s account can be seen as an expansion and development of Aristotle’s conception. She starts from two interpretive points: First, by appealing especially to Aristotle’s biological writings, she stresses that form and matter are not as it were two distinct ontological orders that are contingently brought together in any organism or its parts. Rather matter, at least at the level of human experience, is always adapted to the form that it embodies, and form inheres in only a certain range of matter. As Aristotle’s explanations are always ultimately teleological, one could put the point by noting that with the aim of keeping an organism sufficiently warm, not any matter will work, but only a range that includes fur and blubber. Second, Sheets-Johnstone argues that, despite the apparent anomaly of the sense of touch, Aristotle offers a unified account of the senses wherein in the operation of each sense there is something perceived, an organ of perception, and a medium of contact between the perceived and the sense-organ. Then she recurs to the fundamental point that Aristotle conceives of the action of perceiving in every case as an instance of motion (kinesis). So perception, like organic action itself, is always kinetic.

     With this bold interpretation of movement as always a fundamental characteristic of animation itself, the stage is set for Husserl’s account of the animate body. Husserl’s characterizations of the body read as if elaborations of Sheets-Johnstone’s Aristotle, for example, “given with the localization of the kinesthetic series in the relevant moving member of the Body is the fact that in all perception and perceptual exhibition (experience) the Body is involved as freely moved sense organ, as freely moved totality of sense organs” (Husserl, p. 61 (all italicized in the original)). Sheets-Johnstone gives further determination to Husserl’s conception of the animate body by speaking it as the bearer of ‘tactile-kinetic invariants’. Let us consider these three terms in reverse order. The invariants are features of human embodiment that are possessed by all human beings and have not changed since the emergence of human beings as a distinct species. Appeal to such invariants gives Sheets-Johnstone a short route to solving one of the seemingly intractable problems in the philosophy of the visual arts, namely ‘Why and how do we find so much of the great art of the Paleolithic both intelligible and moving?’ Despite our pretty much total lack of knowledge of the language, customs, and beliefs of the reindeer hunters of southern France and northeastern Spain, their art remains powerful. Part of the explanation must be that they are fellow human beings, and so much share with us a great deal of the features of human embodiment and the central mechanisms of artistic meaning-making. The philosopher Samuel Todes gave a similar insistence with “our body as source of our experience is cross-culturally and trans-historically invariant in the sense that it has not evolved in historical time” (Todes, p. 263).

     Sheets-Johnstone devotes hundreds of pages to arguing for the claim that the animate body is fundamentally kinetic, but the direction of her arguments should be reasonably clear from the brief indication above of her interpretation of Aristotle. By great contrast, she gives relatively little attention to the term ‘tactile’. I’m accordingly uncertain how much weight or importance to give to the term, and she even at times refers indifferently to ‘corporal-kinetic invariants’ or ‘bodily invariants’ (for example, at Sheets-Johnstone (2011), p. 333). In her most careful account, she distinguishes ‘corporeal uniformities’, such as having “two legs of a certain form, teeth of a certain kind, a tongue of a certain shape”, etc., from the invariants, which are founded upon such uniformities (Sheets-Johnstone (1990), p.368; alternatively, the invariants are characterized as ‘regularities’ (p. 369), and yet otherwise as ‘tactile-kinesthetic concepts’ (p. 380)). As I understand it, what is important here is not ‘tactile’ as opposed to ‘corporeal’, but rather something of the following line of thinking: human bodies must be grasped fundamentally as animate forms; animation is so to speak equiprimordial with movement (kinesis); basic (and fundamentally non-linguistic) concepts arise out of regular movements and actions (so the action of biting into something is part of the experiential foundation of the concept of hardness); and (I have not yet mentioned this point, which Sheets-Johnstone stresses) by analogical inferences based upon shared animate forms, we can securely make empirical generalizations across human life cross-culturally and trans-historically, and so attribute, say, our concept of hardness to the human beings of the Paleolithic. The term ‘tactile-kinetic invariants’ is a place-holder for the indeterminately large number of actions, concepts, and feelings that can be so inferred.

     Regardless of one’s estimation of Sheets-Johnstone’s precise views, her account seemingly provides the basis upon which we can consider the contents and structure of the basic features of human embodiment that are recruited into artistic meaning. So the next key questions here are ‘What are these invariants?’ and ‘What roles do they play among the conditions for artistic meaning?’ In my next post I’ll present considerations for thinking that among the most important relevant corporeal bases of artistic meaning are are those given in the conceptual pair inside/outside, the senses of uprightness, frontality, and rhythm, and that the key mechanism is a kind of projection.

 References and Sources Consulted:

 Aristotle, De Anima (mid-4th century B.C.E.)

Eugene Gendlin, Line by Line Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, Volumes 1 & 2 (2012)

-----A Process Model (2017)

Pavel Gregoric, Aristotle on the Common Sense (2007)

Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy II (1913-28)

Michael Podro, Depiction (1999)

Ronald Polansky, Aristotle’s De Anima (2007)

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Roots of Thinking (1990)

-----The Primacy of Movement (2011)

Christopher Shields, Aristotle: De Anima (2016)

Samuel Todes, ‘The Subject Body in Perception and Conception: A Brief Sketch”, Body and World (2001)

Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)

The World in an Eye, First Draft, #5: Against Hylomorphism and Presentism; Towards The Body

Having sketched the concept of artistic meaning, I turn to the consideration of the human capabilities and capacities whose exercise makes artistic meaning possible, and further which are mobilized in the seemingly automatic, everyday creation of artistic meaning in making and perception. Or so I shall argue. As stated at the end of my previous post, I’ll treat the basic sources of artistic meaningfulness through consideration of human embodiment, gesture, pointing, technics, and language. Each of these topics merits at the very least book-length consideration, but in the interest of finishing this book in my lifetime I’ll give highly schematic accounts of each of these, and always with an eye to how they are mobilized and employed in artistic meaningfulness.

     I’ll also try to bring out the distinctiveness of my account by regularly contrasting it with what I take to be two deeply entrenched ways of approaching the relevant issues. One way, and which I have already briefly discussed, is accounts that begin with the alleged distinction between form and content. The great originator of all such accounts surely is Aristotle, who in the first books of his Physics considers the problem of the intelligibility of change, and introduces the so-called doctrine of the four causes (material, efficient, formal, and final), and who goes on in many treatises to apply, develop, and adapt this type of account to a great range of phenomena in nature and human life. The basic distinction underlying the four causes is between form (morphe) and matter (hyle), and so in technical or scholarly philosophy this range of accounts is referred to as ‘hylomorphic’. The tendency in the twentieth-century to approach the arts through the form/content (or sound/sense, manner/topic, how/what, etc.) distinction is a late flowering of hylomorphism. The second manner of considering the arts that I’ll contest is harder to place, perhaps because of its omnipresence: I’ll call it ‘presentism’, by which I mean the tendency to treat artistic meaning as something that is given all at once—or not given--to anyone who happens to encounter and perceive the artwork. Presentism ignores and shields from consideration two basic features of artistic meaning. One feature is indicated in Richard Wollheim’s formulation that artistic meaning is perceived by a ‘suitably attuned’ viewer. Presentism ignores the conditions of suitable attunement, and so diminishes the role of tradition, dismisses training and apprenticeship, and is blind to sociological and anthropological dimensions of participation and audience. Secondly, presentism imagines that artistic meaning is all there at every moment, and so misses the frequent difficult and temporally extended ways in which artistic meaning is revealed and grasped. Above all, it misses a fundamental point that I first mention here: that artistic meaning is non-finite, in the sense that no one is ever in a position to give a definitive and exhaustive account of the artistic meaning of an artwork. (I shall argue for this claim later)

    I turn now to what I’ll call the first great reservoir of artistic meaningfulness, the human body. Extended philosophical reflection upon the human body as something other and more than a hindrance to intellectual and spiritual advancement begins with Aristotle’s late and great treatise De Anima (On the Soul). Along with a hylomorphic conceptualization of the relation between soul and body (412a19-20: “the soul is a substance as the form of a natural body”), Aristotle considers the characteristics of perception for each of the five (traditionally considered) senses, as well as the character of the perception of objects by more than one sense. (I’ll return to these latter two topics) Most of what I’ve read in the past half-century on human embodiment is in, or explicitly indebted to, the discussion of the embodied character of perception, movement, and self-awareness in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception; although in recent decades there seems to have a shift in interest to a discussion that Merleau-Ponty must have drawn upon, that is, the account of the body in Edmund Husserl’s manuscript Ideas II. Husserl opens with the statement that “The Body is, in the first place, the medium of all perception; it is the organ of perception and is necessarily involved in all perception”, and further is “the bearer of the zero point of orientation, the bearer of the here and now . . . each thing that appears has eo ipso an orienting relation to the Body” (p. 61) Husserl notes a two-fold aspect of the body, as so-to-speak a thing among things, but also as something that is mine as the localization of my perceptions and sensations. So as mine, it also admits of further conceptualization in terms of my perceptions: Husserl speaks of a ‘tactual Body’ and a ‘visual Body’ (pp. 158-9). And as the zero point of orientation, it is involved in all lived spatial distinctions (near/far; above/below; right/left) (p. 166).

     Independently of Husserl, the poet Paul Valéry proposed that each of us has four bodies, or, perhaps more carefully put, four fundamental conceptualizations of the body: (i) “the privileged object of which, at each instant, we find ourselves in possession (Valéry, p. 35) [so something like Husserl’s second sense]; (ii) “the one which others see, and an approximation of which confronts us in the mirror or in portraits” (p. 37) (something like the concept of ‘body-image’, which I’ll briefly consider in the next post); (iii) the body considered as a physico-chemical mechanism (p. 38); (iv) a conceptual construction, which could equally be called ‘the real body’ or ‘the imaginary body’, something upon which Valéry charges with solving all the dilemmas arising from reflecting upon the first three bodies: the origin of life, the nature of death, whether we’re free, etc. (pp. 39-40).

    In the most recent major statement known to me, the philosopher and psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin proposed a four-fold distinction of the body, but more specifically of the body considered in relation to its environment. Gendlin asserts that the body and its environment are in some sense one (p. 4),and suggests conceptualizations of the body that focus upon its environment. First, if the environment is considered from the point of view of a spectator, the body is something that ‘interacts’ with its environment. Then if environmental processes are highlighted, the body and its environment are just functions of each other: the foot strikes the ground which resists the strike; the process of breathing is ”air-coming-into-lungs-and-blood-cells”. Thirdly, there is the environment considered as the accumulation of instances of the body-environmental processes of the second sense, and correlatively the body considered as “the result of the life process”.  Finally, there is the body-environment life process considered together with its non-actual others, its possibilities and impossibilities. There is everything that never happened and “the seemingly infinite richness of the unborn, something [that] may happen which has not yet” (Gendlin, pp. 4-7).

       Which of these conceptualizations of the body are relevant to our question of the resources for artistic meaningfulness? In my next post I’ll present and develop the suggestion that it will be not just the body-image as part of the material for artistic depiction, but more fundamentally of a mechanism of projection that is usually referred to as the ‘body-schema’.

References:

Aristotle, De Anima/On the Soul (mid-4th-century B.C.E.)

Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (2005)

Eugene Gendlin, A Process Model (2017)

Edmund Husserl, Ideas II (1912-28)

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

Paul Valéry, ‘Some Simple Reflections on the Body’ in Aesthetics (1964)

Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)

The World in an Eye, First Draft #4.5--Podro's Philosophical Anthropology

Having sketched and endorsed Michael Podro’s account of artistic meaning in the visual arts in the previous post, I turn to the question: What sort of broader conception of human life motivates the account, or at least is consistent with it? In particular, what species-specific psychological mechanisms, if any, are required for the account to be so much as a candidate for the explication of artistic meaning? Podro provides bits of answers to these questions; because of both their intrinsic interest and for the illumination they cast on his account, here I’ll summarize and develop these indications.

     Taken together, Podro’s indications of the various psychological mechanisms presupposed by his account might well be considered a contribution to a largely German tradition of philosophical inquiry usually referred to as ‘philosophical anthropology’. In the standard presentation of this tradition in English, Axel Honneth and Hans Joas characterize it as an “[an] intellectual current [that] undertook, in a non-speculative manner, to grasp the ‘fundamental structures of humanity’ through comparison of man and animal, and through critical examination and appropriation of as many findings of the natural and cultural sciences as possible.” On this expansive conception a great many of the works that I’ll be drawing upon later in this book, works in the philosophies of body, language, and technology, as well as studies in cognitive linguistics, the anthropology of art, evolutionary accounts of language and art, etc., could likewise count as part of philosophical anthropology. Podro’s indications touch on four topics: the psychology of pictorial perception; the imagination; the psychology of the unconscious; and the aesthetic.

    As explicated in my previous post, Podro characterizes the process of creating artistic meaning as ‘sustaining recognition’, where ‘recognition’ means the viewer’s seeing something (e.g. a lion) in a marked surface, and ‘sustaining’ indicates anything and everything, especially the material medium, but also orientation to the surface, relation to the environment, etc. etc., that the artist uses in enriching the bare recognition. These elements beyond the recognized subject ‘complicate’ the recognition, which is thereby ‘sustained’ in the sense that, because of the artistic use of the medium etc., the viewer’s engagement with the depiction is not exhausted by the (mere) recognition of what is depicted. The complications enrich the sense of the depicted subject, and simultaneously the psychological mobilization of the subject organizes the non-figurative pictorial elements into contributions to artistic meaning of that subject; as Podro puts it “recognition and complication are each furthered by the other, each serves the other” (Podro (1998), p. 5). There are two conditions for this to so much as be possible: human beings must be able to ‘recognize through difference’, i.e. to recognize that (e.g. a lion) not just when we are face-to-face with the beast, but also in a marked surface; and to ‘imagine’ (i.e. bring non-focal and non-perceptual elements to bear) what is present in perception. The use of these capabilities in artistic perception implies two further points: (i) We must be aware of the difference between the depiction and material surface upon which it appears (that is, we are aware of the distinction between the lion and the paper or canvas upon which the relevant marks and deposits are made), and yet we cannot say exactly where the boundary is between the depicted figure and its support. I take Podro to mean something like this: Imagine an outline drawing of a lion, then point to a spot within the enclosed pictorial space. Are you pointing at the surface, or are you pointing at (say) the lion’s belly? There is no principled answer to the question. (ii) We not only mobilize the imagination in artistic perception (in particular in proposing analogies between subject and medium), but also constrain it. As Richard Wollheim noted, the exercise of the imagination in the visual arts is undertaken with one’s eyes open. The imagination proposes, but what comes to count as part of artistic meaning is what can be seen in the artwork, or at the very least, is what effects how what is visible is seen. What the imagination proposes is part  contents of artistic perception if it rewards artistic perception. As Podro puts it, the use of the imagination “limits itself to what the painting affords; we do not freely project or associate round it but attend to what projections it corroborates or confirms—confirms through other aspects of the painting itself, or through the traditions of usage, which it brings into play” (ibid).

     Is there any reason to be confident that these conditions of artistic depiction hold for human beings generally? Podro’s answer is highly speculative, but nonetheless of great interest. He starts from certain phenomena that he considers undeniable: that depiction carries cross-culturally and trans-historically great expressiveness; that a ‘sense of urgency attends depiction’ ( p.148; I take this to mean that how people depict, and what they depict artistically, is not a matter of indifference, but is characteristically (somehow) tied to the artists’ and viewers’ sense of themselves, of who they are, and of what centrally matters to them); and (as noted early) a condition of artistic depiction is the uncertainty in principle of where to draw the boundary between figure and support. Podro draws from the post-WWII psychologists and psychoanalysts D. W. Winnicott, Hanna Segal, and Marion Milner to give the following account: The human “infant’s internal and external worlds are incompletely differentiated”. The infant has powerful and urgent physical and psychologist needs that it is unable to fulfill on its own, needs for nourishment, security, comfort, and (increasingly) agency in the world. The ‘mother’ (not necessarily a woman or a single person) communicates with the infant, responding to it, gesturing, making sounds and uttering simplified sentences in a sing-song voice (so-called ‘mother-ese’), and thereby for the most part satisfies the infant. The effect of this interaction, initially between mother and infant and then also between the developing infant and objects in the world (Winnicott’s famous ‘transitional object’), is that the developing infant gains a sense of ‘inner and outer reality [as] separate yet interrelated’ (ibid). This ontogenetically archaic sense of inner and outer as separate but interrelated becomes a permanent feature of the adult psyche, and provides the basic structure for the mechanisms of artistic meaning and their use: we project the internal order of the psyche onto a physical artwork, and as we pursue artistic meaningfulness the external (an artwork) and the internal (the psyche of the viewer) “pass into each other”. The crucial feature, Podro says, is that “the propensity to pursue similarity through difference—including the extension of recognition in depiction, would seem to rehearse an archaic urgency within us and its corresponding satisfaction” (p. 149). This pursuit of similarity through difference is a quasi-automatic activity of the imagination, and as such a piece of the unconscious activities that make up much of the mental life of human beings.

     Podro illustrates something of how this urgency plays out in artistic painting through examination of the works of Chardin. For example, consider Chardin’s profoundly unsettling painting ‘The Ray’ (1726).

What makes ‘The Ray’ so powerful? Whence “its psychological force” (p. 176)? Podro suggests that “we first assume that the interest of the work lies in some latent or suppressed materials”. Evidently there’s some sense of violence, but which “is surely responded to openly in the wit and delicacy of the painting.” This could only be possible, that is, paintable in a manner acceptable to an audience, because the painting resonates with “crucifixions and martyrdoms of [prior] history painting” (p. 178). Podro then breaks off the account and recurs to a summary of his speculative thought on the source of the urgencies in depiction. Is that all?

     Perhaps we might complete the short account of ‘The Ray’ with an invocation of the nature of aesthetics. One might ask a version of the old question in the philosophy of art of why tragedy gives pleasure:  Why might we accept the gruesome face of the ray as the vehicle of wit and delicacy? And would not the face of the ray, if seen in the flesh, induce merely a sense of gruesomeness? For while we might well pursue similarities across differences, surely we simultaneously recognize that there are differences, that the depicted ray is not after all the actual ray in the flesh. It seems to me that Podro also needs an account of the aesthetic dimension of the arts, some attitude or manner of sensibility wherein human beings withdraw from immediate contact and responses to depictions. Aesthetics is barely mentioned in Depiction, and plays not substantive role in any of Podro’s analyses. But there is, I think, a place in Podro’s writings where we can see what he might in response to this paragraph’s questions. A quarter of a century before Depiction, in his first book The Manifold of Perception, Podro surveys and analyzes Kant’s and Schiller’s  accounts of aesthetics along those of some of their nineteenth-century successors. At one point Podro gives qualified approval to the philosopher Stuart Hampshire’s statement that the experience of art “is by definition an experience in which practical interests, and the ordinary classifications that reflect them, are for a time suspended in the unpractical enjoyment of the arrangement of something perceived. Any strong aesthetic experience is necessarily an interruption of normal habits of recognition, a relaxing of the usual practical stance in the face of everything external” (Hampshire, p. 244, quoted in Podro (1972), p. 123 n.1). Podro then comments that in order for Hampshire to link art with the rest of human concerns, he must be taken to mean that the aesthetic attitude involves “an arrest of mere recognition, not suspension of recognition” (Podro, ibid). One cannot help but notice the seeds of Podro’s mature account in this much earlier book. Adapting the point to the later account, one can say that the aesthetic attitude is part of the response to meaning qua artistic meaning, as the viewer of the arts understands herself as pursuing similarity, not identity, across difference.

      This completes my initial sketch of Podro’s account. I’ll develop these points in later sections of the book, in particular in the account of the ideals of coherence and unity in the arts. Next I turn to the very basic human capacities exercised in the creation and perception of artistic meaning, which will involve exploring fundamental aspects of human life: embodiment, gesture, the hand, language, and technology.

 References:

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

Stuart Hampshire, Thought and Action (1959)

Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, Social Action and Human Nature (1988)

Marion Milner, ‘The Ordering of Chaos’, in The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men (1987)

Michael Podro, The Manifold of Perception (1972)

-----Depiction (1998)

Hanna Segal, ‘Notes on Symbol Formation’ (1957), in The Work of Hanna Segal (1986)

D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (1971)

4.4: The World in an Eye, First Draft, Part 4.4: Podro’s Account Sustained

     In my previous post I introduced Michael Podro’s account of artistic meaning, an account that will provide the basic orientation in this book. In this post I’ll present Podro’s account as an alternative to traditional accounts, and try to give some sense of how the account is applied to particular artworks.

      As previously noted, Podro’s master term for artistic meaning is ‘sustaining recognition’. One helpful way to approach Podro’s point in coining this term is to consider the prevailing approach (with numerous variations) to artistic meaning in the 20th century. First, a basic contrast is drawn, most commonly between ‘form’ and ‘content’; variations for ‘form’ include ‘medium’, ‘manner of presentation’, ‘sound’ (with regard to poetry), while variations for ‘content’ include ‘subject’, ‘sense’, and ‘aboutness’. Next, one asserts that presentation of ‘content’ without ‘form’ is characteristic of a wide range of non-artistic artifacts or utterances. Correlatively, the presentation of ‘form’ without ‘content’ is empty, something like the presentation of a system of ordering without anything to order. Then, crucially, one asserts that the distinctive characteristic of art and/or artistic meaning is that in them form and content ‘fuse’. On this account, works of art aim at and, if successful, achieve a kind of unity wherein the content is somehow, in ways that are exceptionally difficult to explain, inseparable from the manner in which it is presented. The persistence of this kind of account perhaps testifies to the sense that it captures something of the central characteristics of art and artworks.

     Nonetheless, the problems with this class of accounts have shown themselves to be insuperable. For example, in the early twentieth-century the art critic Clive Bell had already noted that any content whatsoever is presented in some manner or other. In the grips of the form/content distinction, Bell was forced to conclude that what makes an artifact a work of art must be its possession of a special kind of form, which he called ‘significant form’. But what makes a form ‘significant’? Bell could do no better than suggest that a significant form is “form behind which we catch a sense of ultimate reality” (Bell, p. 46), and ‘reality’ is glossed as “that which lies behind the appearance of all things—that which gives to all things their individual significance, the thing in itself, the ultimate reality” (ibid, p. 54). So Bell could offer no non-circular account of what distinguished significant form from non-significant form, and I would suggest that no later author has ultimately fared better. In any case the fundamental and to my mind definitive destruction of the account came from Richard Wollheim, who noted and analyzed the impossibility of distinguishing in a principled way form from non-formal elements in a visual work of art (Wollheim (1995), especially pp. 21-2), and so the very idea of a basic distinction between form and something else such as content, collapses.

     Podro’s account, it seems to me, cuts the Gordian knot of the form/content distinction and its attempted applications.. He starts from the very general notion of a recognition, which includes anything and everything involved in the perceptual, imaginative, and cognitive grasp of a subject matter; his book Depiction opens with the sentence “At the core of depiction is the recognition of its subject” (Podro (1998), p. 5). I take it that the prototype of recognition in this sense is someone looking at a marked surface and seeing, say, a lion, but it could be much more elaborate, as when one looks at an inked surface and sees Hendrickje sleeping, while someone else only sees a young woman sleeping.

The account does not require that the subject matter be recognized under a particular description or with a particular degree of specificity: one person looks at a wall in the cave at Lascaux and sees an auroch, another looks and sees a cow-like beast.

Podro opposes recognition to ‘complications’, which are anything and everything that the visual artist uses to elaborate the interest, meaning, or significance of the subject matter as (merely) recognized. The recognized subject matter of a visual depiction is something seen, and the relevant complications, because they are something different than what is given to vision, are said to be ‘imagined’. And since the artistic meaning in a work of visual art is something more than what is given in (visual) recognition, artistic meaning generally for Podro is made with the employment of the imagination.

     Evidently, Podro’s account will only be convincing if it guides in an illuminating manner the interpretation of actual works of visual art, and most of the book is devoted to the analysis of such particulars, including works by Donatello, Rembrandt, Hogarth, and Chardin. To get an initial feel for how Podro’s account conceptualizes and explicates artistic meaning, consider his brief remarks about the ink drawing ‘Draughtsman and Model’ (c. 1639), one of the dozen-and-a-half works of Rembrandt he discusses.

Podro characterizes this drawing as part of group of Rembrandt’s prints, paintings, and drawings that possess “a low viewpoint which has the effect of occluding the middle ground and bringing foreground figures up into the picture”. A traditional account would likely identify this low viewpoint as a ‘formal’ feature; instead, Podro immediately notes how Rembrandt’s use of the low viewpoint transforms and enriches the viewer’s (mere) recognition of the depicted persons: “the figures that lie on the other side of the occluding ridge [i.e. the middleground which seen from a low viewpoint seems to rise up and block the sense of a continuous space between middle- and background] approach the main foreground group from the opposite side to the spectator, and we seem invited to conceive a symmetry between them and us, and to see their position on the other side of the dominant plane as the counterpart to ours” (p. 64). In ‘Draughtsman and Model’ this use of orientation and its effect is thematized, or, in Podro’s words “becomes highly explicit” (pp. 64-5), as the implied artist in the studio views the figure from the side opposite the viewer. Podro then asserts that this mirroring effect of implying a background viewer opposite the actual spectator of the piece is part of a general feature of Rembrandt’s style, where Rembrandt suggests “that the spectator’s view is one of several possibilities” and so “the subject is not felt to be absorbed or summated in the way it is represented, in the particular view” (p. 65).

     In the terminology I use in this book, I would say that the low viewpoint is the mechanism that in its particular uses contributes to the overall artistic meaning of the piece, which is the sense that there are multiple and non-exhaustive views of the subject. One can read Podro’s magnificent book for dozens of further examples of what almost seems to be the non-finite number of uses of a large number of mechanisms. One question that immediately arises is: if something like Podro’s account offers a viable and convincing way of thinking about artistic meaning, then what must human beings be like so that such an account may so much as fit human life, human psychology, human practices and institutions, and human cultures? What sense of the nature of art is involved in this account? And what of aesthetics? If these questions were put to the range of accounts using the form/content distinction, one could readily answer with something like Aristotle’s conception of human life, as the form/content distinction originates in the account of change in his book Physics, as developed in human psychology in On the Soul, in the arts in Poetics, etc. Does Podro’s account offer something analogous, or is it perhaps neutral among differing conceptions of human psychology and institutions? In order to develop this account of artistic meaning, I turn to Podro’s answers to these questions in the next post.

 References:  

Aristotle, Physics

-----On the Soul

-----Poetics

Clive Bell, Art, (1948), 5th edition (originally 1913)

Michael Podro, Depiction (1998)

Richard Wollheim, On Formalism and its Kinds/Sobre el Formalism i els seus tipus (1995)

The World in an Eye, First Draft, Part 4.3: Michael Podro’s account of artistic meaning

In my last two posts I’ve introduced Richard Wollheim’s account of artistic meaning in painting, and suggested that, whatever its merits (very great to my mind), it cannot be thought to exhaust the kinds of distinctively artistic meaning found in the visual arts generally. So in this post I’ll sketch an alternative, the account of artistic meaning offered by the philosopher Michael Podro in the late 1990s in his book Depiction, with some supplemental elaborations given by the philosopher Patrick Maynard a few years later. In the rest of the book I’ll adopt this latter account and treat Wollheim’s account as something of a special case of Podro’s more general account. I’ll argue that Podro’s conceptual framework, with further qualifications and supplementations, can provide a unified account of artistic meaning in the visual arts, including such prominent kinds of visual art as decoration and the performative use of visual props, such as masks.

     Both Wollheim’s and Podro’s accounts can plausibly be seen as originating in critical responses to a particular claim in the great post-World War II monument in art history, E. H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion. As construed by Wollheim, one part of Gombrich’s large argument in that book was an assertion about the basic nature of depictive vision, that is, the visual perception of pictures qua pictures of something. Gombrich insisted that the viewer of a picture can either be aware of what is depicted (say, a lion), or of the physical surface or support of the depiction (say, a piece of paper with linear pencil marks), but not both simultaneously. Gombrich thereby assimilates depictive seeing to something like seeing the famous duck-rabbit drawing: however familiar the drawing, one either sees a duck or a rabbit, but not both at the same time.

     In introducing the concept of ‘seeing-in’, Wollheim asserted the opposite, that is, that in ordinary depictive vision the viewer is simultaneously aware of both the depicted figure and the physical, material support. Accordingly, the perception of depictions could not be captured with the duck-rabbit diagram as a kind of ‘seeing-as’, where the viewer sees the diagram now as one thing, now as another. As Wollheim put it: “Seeing-in permits unlimited simultaneous attention to what is seen and to the features of the medium. Seeing-as does not.” (Wollheim (1980), p. 212) This counter-assertion was the germ of Wollheim’s account of representational seeing as ‘seeing-in’; in standard cases of depictive seeing the viewer’s experience has the phenomenological character of ‘seeing-something-in-something’, e. g. seeing a lion in a marked surface. The kinds of artistic meaning that Wollheim surveyed in Painting as an Art presuppose and build upon this fundamental character of depictive seeing as seeing-in, as aspects of a picture’s medium—physical support and material marks—are recruited into the artistic meaning of the picture as a whole. In some of his most elaborated and insightful analyses, Wollheim argued that artistic paintings in many cases metaphorized their surfaces and the character of their marks, especially in terms of treating the material surface and/or the marks as (metaphorically) corporeal, and thereby contributed to the artistic meanings of the painting.

An especially powerful instance of this is the account of Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas, wherein, so Wollheim claims, the material surface of the painting is conceptualized as a kind of skin, and trailing deposits of paint as blood.

     Podro accepted Wollheim’s counter-claim, but he did not treat seeing-in as the basis of artistic meaning in visual art. Something of Podro’s mature account can be seen already in his first book, The Manifold of Perception, a study of the German tradition of accounts of visual perception in the arts from Kant through Adolf Hildebrand in the late 19th century. In discussing Hildebrand’s account of sculptural relief, Podro notes that it “is surely characteristic of our experience not only of classical relief but of painting that we do distinguish between those paintings on the one hand in which we take the surface or medium for granted—so that we may be said to look through the surface to the subject represented—and those paintings on the other where we have the kind of involvement which we recognize as characteristic of art.” (Podro (1972), p. 87) Podro agrees with Wollheim in thinking that  artistic painting is distinguished from everyday painting in that the former bore richer kinds of meaningfulness, and further follows Wollheim in thinking that one major way in which an artist achieves this richness is by building up analogies between what is represented and the medium in and through which the figure is represented (see Wollheim (1980), p. 224 and Podro (1998) p. 6) achieved. But instead of starting from the perceptual capacity of seeing-in as basic to depictive representation, Podro starts the notion of visual recognition: “At the core of depiction is the recognition of its subject” (p. 5). Podro then deviates from Wollheim in two ways: First, he generalizes the point about recruiting features of the medium into artistic meaning into a claim about any and all aspects of artistic meaning that are not inherently bound to the recognition of the subject. Anything besides sheer recognition of the subject that the artist incorporates into the artistic meaning of the work is treated as an instance of complicating the recognition. Second, he says that such recruitment is an instance of the use of the imagination.  

      So whereas Wollheim had treated the imagination as the source of important though partial kinds of artistic meaningfulness, Podro treats it as so to speak the perceptual organ of artistic meaning per se. Podro’s central claim is that artistic meaning should be grasped as what he calls ‘sustaining recognition’, and that recognition is ‘sustained’, that is not simply completed in the recognition that ‘this is an X’, is through the employment of the imagination. Podro will say that in artistic depiction we “imagine what we recognize in it” (ibid).  One might think that this is a mere terminological change or re-description. In my next post I’ll argue that on the contrary it is the conceptual breakthrough that allows Wollheim’s central points to become part of a general account of artistic meaning in the visual arts.

 Note: Another personal anecdote: When I publicly interviewed Wollheim in 2002, he asserted that artistic meaning in painting begins with the Renaissance Venetians’ leaving the brush stroke visible, producing ‘a certain ruffling of the surface’. Dumbstruck, I could only manage to ask “Well, then what was Giotto doing, if not painting as an art?” It didn’t seem to me that I got an answer.

References:

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

Michael Podro, The Manifold in Perception (1972)

-----Depiction (1998)

Richard Wollheim, ‘Seeing-as, seeing-in’, in Art and its Objects (1980)

-----Painting as an Art (1987)

The World in an Eye, First Draft Part 4.2: Limitations of Scope in Wollheim’s Account of Artistic Meaning

      In my previous post I first introduced very general recent characterizations of meaning in human life, and then summarized Richard Wollheim’s account of meaning in painting practiced as an art. My suggestion is that, with adjustments and qualifications, Wollheim’s account can be used as a model for the philosophical understanding of artistic meaning in the visual arts generally. Recall Wollheim’s three fields of concern: a characterization of the core of the artistic process qua meaning-making as thematization; the description of a variety of kinds of artistic meaning, including representation, expression, creating an implied viewer in a picture, borrowing, textuality, and metaphor; and the investigation of the psychological capacities (perhaps species-specific) that are presupposed for artistic meaning to so much as be possible, in particular seeing-in, expressive perception, and the capacity for certain kinds of pleasure in seeing. While Wollheim’s account of seeing-in has attracted a great deal of attention from academic philosophers of art, with numerous appropriations, qualifications, extensions, and/or rejections, and likewise to a much lesser extent his account of expression, most of his thinking summarized here, and the overall shape of the account and his guiding concerns, has been largely neglected. I’ll return to each of his points at some length, but for now my concern is with the general features of his account and its scope.

      One question that immediately suggests itself is: Why are these particular capacities (seeing-in, expressive perception, visual pleasure) invoked? By contrast, a broad range of accounts of the psychological sources and cultural origins of visual art have cited the ‘imagination’, with varying characterizations and emphases concerning what the typical operations of the imagination are, as the explanans (for a representative example, see Currie (2003)). A personal anecdote leads into the heart of the question: Wollheim’s Painting as an Art was based upon his Mellon Lectures, and he also delivered a revised version of the lectures as a graduate class at UC Berkeley in 1986. As a three-time college dropout those lectures at Berkeley; hearing them was one of the great intellectual adventures of my life. For me the most startling thing in the lectures was at one point Wollheim off-handedly saying that the paintings of Barnett Newman, though perhaps an interesting kind of conceptual art, were not artistic paintings at all, that is, they were not instances of painting practiced as an artform. 

The alleged reason they weren’t was because they did not present the viewer with any sense of depictive space; adapting Frank Stella’s remark about his minimalist painting, ‘what you see is what you see, and that’s all that you see: there is no figure/support, foreground/background, no part/whole elements or a fortiori relations’.

I’m uncertain what Wollheim would have said if pressed—one of his outstanding characteristics was making surprising and seemingly wrong remarks that, after one reflected for some minutes or years, showed themselves to be right;  but I think part of his point was that neither seeing-in nor expressive perception were exercised in seeing Newman’s paintings, and so they could not be among the vast number of richly meaning-bearing paintings that comprise the world’s artistic paintings.

     If something like this way of taking Wollheim’s point is right, then even if we were to agree with Wollheim that seeing-in is a basic psychological and perceptual capacity exercised in painting as an art, a more general account of visual art (which must include Newman’s work) will need to include other perceptual capacities among the conditions of the artforms introduced in my earlier posts. What further perceptual capacities are involved in the making and perceptual encounter with visual arts like decoration and masking? In pursuit of such conditions subsequent posts will start from much more basic features of human life than those proposed by Wollheim: those relating to embodiment, the use of the hand, artifact-making, and vision generally.

     Two further points where my account will differ from Wollheim’s are in the conception of and roles for imagination in visual art, and in the role of materiality. Wollheim has a great deal of interest to say about the imagination, but in this context our concern is that he sharply distinguished the exercises of the imagination from those uses of seeing-in that are basic to artistic painting. Wollheim’s general attitude was that the artistic uses of the imagination supervened upon the conceptually prior exercise of seeing-in. Wollheim restricted the artistic employment of the imagination to what he called ‘imaginative projects’, such as imaging what a particular depicted figure’s mental state is; and so unsurprisingly he does not take imagination under any conception to be among the basic perceptual capacities exercised in painting as an art. Secondly, by ‘materiality’ I mean both the sense that mark-making typically involves the depositing of paint and/or the inscribing of line, and that both the sheer physicality of the marks, and the ways in which they introduce senses of dynamism and intentionality, are insufficiently acknowledged and developed in Wollheim’s account.

     Accordingly In this book I’ll adopt and attempt to develop the account of meaning in the visual arts introduced by the philosopher Michael Podro in the late 1990s in his profound book Depiction, which was additionally developed with regard to drawing as an art by the philosopher Patrick Maynard in his book Drawing Distinctions. The points made in Wollheim’s account will then be treated as a part of Podro’s more general account. So in my next post I’ll sketch the basic features of Podro’s account of artistic meaning as a matter of what he calls ‘sustaining recognition’.  

References:

Gregory Currie, ‘The capacities that enable us to produce and consume art’, in Imagination, Philosophy, and the Arts (2003), edited by Matthew Kieran and Dominic McIver Lopes

Patrick Maynard, Drawing Distinctions (2005)

Michael Podro, Depiction (1998)

Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)

The World in an Eye: The Philosophy of Visual Art First Draft #4.1: Towards Artistic Meaning

     In this post I’ll attempt to sketch my basic conception of artistic meaning, with the rest of the book attempting to develop and explicate the conception with regard to the visual arts. Readers familiar with the philosophy of the visual arts of the past half-century will recognize my great indebtedness to the thought of three philosophers in particular: Richard Wollheim on the nature of meaning in painting practiced as an art; Michael Podro on artistic meaning as ‘sustaining recognition’; and Patrick Maynard on artistic meaning as the product of an artist’s conceptual and practical ‘tool-box’.

     One way to begin reflecting on the notion of artistic meaning might be to think about meaning generally. But isn’t this to attempt to explicate the obscure with the empty? Recall Dewey’s suggestion that we should dispense with talk of ‘meaning’, or the post-War attempt to give some determinate direction and content to talk of ‘meaning’ by treating it as a linguistic property that can be explicated in terms of truth-conditions of sentences or propositions. More recently some philosophers working within broadly pragmatic or so-called enactivist orientations have offered seemingly converging lines of reflection. In their recently published book The Blind Spot, Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and the enactivist Evan Thompson write that “Autonomy and agency imply sensemaking. Organisms are sensemaking beings. They create worlds of relevance . . . Meaning resides . . . at the level of autonomous agency, which is to say at the level of the organism as a whole.” (Frank et alia, pp. 153-4) With a different emphasis, in a series of books published in the past twenty years, the philosopher Mark Johnson, drawing primarily from John Dewey and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and incorporating recent work in cognitive science and linguistics, has attempted a number of overlapping characterizations. In an initial formulation he characterizes his pragmatist conception of meaning generally as the degree of relationality or connectedness in human experience: “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 similar formulations, see Johnson (2017), p. 19 and Johnson (2018), p. 14) Johnson further stresses that meaning in this pragmatist-phenomenological sense pervades the experiences to which it is attached, and that, while it may be unconscious, it must in some sense be felt.

    There are two overlapping emphases in the accounts of the enactivists and of Johnson. Both stress the embodied character of meaning, and both argue that the neglect of the body in main lines of Western philosophy occludes or distorts the philosophical understanding of central phenomena in human life. Additionally, both stress that meaning is grasped reflectively through the focal concern with meaning-making. Johnson provides the richer and more detailed account of the structures and mechanisms of meaning-making, and so his work will figure prominently in upcoming posts.

     I turn now to the work of the philosopher Richard Wollheim, who has offered what seems to me the model for what an account of artistic meaning must include. Wollheim himself thought that what could intelligibly be said about art, and so also artistic meaning, in general was quite restrictive, and said what he had to say about it in his monograph Art and Its Objects, which opens with a sustained  discussion of the ontology of artworks, then moves on to and through a range of topics including representation, expression, and style, all guided by the thought that art is a ‘form of life’ (in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s sense). When I interviewed Wollheim publicly in 2002, he firmly stated at the beginning that he did not wish to talk about art in general, but rather only about painting as an art. And indeed his extended account of artistic meaning is that laid out specifically for painting when, and only when, practiced as an artform. In Painting as an Art Wollheim begins by asking: “How is painting to be practiced as an art?” (Wollheim, p. 17) He immediately notes that it is uninformative to begin in this manner without having said anything about what it is to be an art, and then suggests that one start with an ‘imaginary development’ “of an activity that isn’t painting [as an art] but is like it, though more primitive”, which he calls ‘Ur-painting’. (p. 19) In Ur-painting intends to deposit marks upon a support with the aim of creating something that acquires “content or meaning”. (p. 22) In the pursuit of content or meaning, the Ur-painting undertakes a process of making which has four conceptually distinct phases: depositing or mark-making;

taking stock of this depositing or making;

abstracting an  (unintentionally made) feature from the existing deposit or mark; making a further deposit or mark guided by what was achieved in the first three steps. In practice these steps are typically fused, and the movement through steps one to four is nearly instantaneous. The first three steps make up the central mechanism of meaning-making, which Wollheim calls ‘thematization’ (p. 20), which is the core feature of the artistic process qua meaning-making.

     If the artistic process as the repeated undertaking of thematization in the service of producing meaning, then what is (artistic) meaning? Wollheim urges that there a variety of kinds of artistic meaning in painting. The most central are representation (what the painting shows) and expression, which Wollheim understands as the expression of some psychological state, some feeling, emotion, and/or mood. Additionally, Wollheim devotes a chapter to each of four further kinds of meaning: borrowing, where the artist incorporates some material from prior artifacts, especially previous artistic paintings; textuality, where the artist incorporates some bit of text (say, a piece of philosophical doctrine) into the painting; metaphor, where the artist metaphorizes some aspect of the painting (the surface, the way the paint is deposited, etc.); and by introducing the sense that there is an undepicted viewer within the painting, and so an implied viewpoint upon the subject-matter of the work (this is an exceptionally difficult conception that has not found much favor; Wollheim told me that he arrived at it from long viewing of the works of Edouard Manet, wherein he came to think that the persons in Manet’s work are shown as aware of being viewed from some angle other than that of the painter or canonical viewer in front of the work).

     Wollheim’s third concern in the philosophy of painting as an art is the exploration of what we might call the psychological conditions of the possibility of artistic meaning. In the best known and most discussed part of his work, he urges that the possibility of representational meaning in artistic painting presupposes a human, species-wide capacity for what he famously calls ‘seeing-in’, the capacity to see some figure in some marks on a surface. Someone adds a few lines to a paper, and a suitably attuned spectator can, for example, see a bull.

Expression presupposes the psychological capacity for expressive vision; one sees, for example, a misty landscape and finds it expressive of melancholy. [PHOTO]

A final capacity, one that is especially difficult to discuss and about which Wollheim says little, is the capacity to find pleasure in artistic pleasure. Without such a possibility, the enterprise of artistic painting would die out after the cultural conditions that gave it a point shifted (aiding magical spells; glorifying great princes; advocating social justice; etc.)

     So there are on Wollheim’s account three spheres of concern in the philosophy of painting as an art: the psychological mechanisms of meaning-making as thematization; the varieties of artistic meaning; and the psychological conditions of the possibility of the first two. Can Wollheim’s account fruitfully serve as a guide for a philosophy of the visual arts generally? In this book I argue that it can with suitable qualifications. I’ll start to sketch out how and with what qualifications in my next post.

References:

 John Dewey, Experience and Nature (1925)

-----Art as Experience (1934)

Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson, The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience (2024)

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

-----Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason: How Our Bodies Give Rise to Understanding (2017)

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

Patrick Maynard, Drawing Distinctions (2005)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (1962)

Michael Podro, Depiction (1998)

Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)

The World in an Eye, First Draft, Part 3.3: Artistic Meaning at Full Stretch

Aiming to provide a sense of the range of works that a philosophy of the visual arts should consider, I continue with my fourth initial piece, Rembrandt’s famous ink drawing ‘Hendrikje Asleep’ from around 1655. I choose this particular work, from among tens of thousands of possibilities, as an instance of a work that, unlike my previous examples, is produced for suitably attuned viewers outside of any decorative, ritual, mythological, or ceremonial context, and is offered solely for visual inspection. Such works are likely what come to most people’s minds as paradigmatic instances of visual art. As with my other choices, I consider this work along with an outstandingly penetrating analysis of it, that given by the philosopher Patrick Maynard in his book Drawing Distinctions. Maynard also there gives what seems to me the single most illuminating demonstration of the ways in which artistic meaning is built, and so provides a partial justification for the conception I previously referred to as the ‘zero degree’ of artistic meaning in Zafimanary carvings. The Rembrandt drawing is at the other end of the spectrum of artistic meaning as the presentation of artistic meaningfulness at what Maynard calls ‘full stretch’.

     As I draw heavily from Maynard, so Maynard in his account drew heavily from the art historian Philip Rawson’s magisterial book Drawing. A basic, negative stylistic feature of Rembrandt’s drawing was his avoidance of a continuous outline around a figure (“like a black wire around the form” as Rembrandt reportedly said). Instead, he would build up a depicted figure most typically with a series of rounded, convex strokes in order to “create rhythmical figures by means of continuous series of linked contour-unites, giving them fresh starts, breaks, and calculated overlaps so that the lines seem to end and begin again” (Rawson, quoted in Maynard (p. 209)). Another central negative aspect of Rembrandt’s style, one that he shares with Goya, is its ‘antianatomical’ quality (p. 172), where the size and placement of the torso and limbs are left indeterminate, as in Goya’s ‘Three Soldiers Carrying a Wounded Man’ (1812-23):

A third central, and this one positive, feature of Rembrandt’s, Goya’s, and also Titian’s drawing is the use of ‘autonomous’ shadows, partially unlinked from the light-occluding bodies that cast them and linked instead with other shadows to form structuring blocks as if orthogonal to the drawing’s depicted figures (p. 168) , as in Titian’s ‘St. Eustace (or St. Hubert) in a Landscape’ (c.1520),

or in Goya’s ‘Two Prisoners in Irons’ (1820-23):

     The rhythmic aspect is particularly salient in the clockwise drawn curved lines that form Hendrikje’s back and buttocks. The marks are varied yet readily grouped together as a distinctive bit of the drawing’s lexicon. The quasi-temporal aspect of these grouped marks is two-fold: First, as noted, they strongly exhibit the temporal ordering of their own making, as each stroke exhibits a passage from wet to dry where the loaded brush first touches the paper and then drains as the mark progresses. Second, and more ambiguously, the marks taken together form a larger temporal patterning from left-to-right, but with a suggestion of a counter-patterning of intensification, with the two darkest, centrally placed marks expressing a kind of climax.

     In Maynard’s book the analysis of the Rembrandt drawing is part of a much longer argument and set of analyses aiming to show that in artistic pictorial depictions the artist has evoked various kinds of ordering (depth, outline, field, etc.) that evoke both those that the visual perception of pictures shares with non-pictorial environmental perception, as well as those that are distinctive of pictures and their making. He calls the various sub-kinds of the latter ‘drawing’s own devices’. His central point with regard to the Rembrandt drawing is that one sees here an exemplary instance of how these two kinds are interwoven in any artistic depiction. Maynard’s point seems to me fundamental, and shall become the starting point (in my next post) of my initial attempt at stating what is meant by the term ‘artistic meaning’.

References:

Patrick Maynard, Drawing Distinctions: The Varieties of Graphic Expression (2005)

Philip Rawson, Drawing (1987)

The World in the Eye, First Draft, Part 3.2: Lévi-Strauss on Masks

     For my third example of visual art, I turn to an instance of a type of mask prominent among the Kwakwaka’wakw (formerly referred to as ‘Kwakiutl’) of the Pacific Northwest, the mask depicting a giant ogress named Dzonokwa (initially referred to by the anthropologist Franz Boas as Tsonō’koa, and now alternatively as Dzunukwa). Among the Kwakwaka’wakw masks are typically the property of particular clans or secret societies, and are usually worn in ceremonial dances and ceremonies generally. Such masks are also instances of another of the world’s largest kinds of visual art, those whose primary use is as a prop in a performance or action. Boas noted in 1890 that the Dzonokwa masks were among the kinds that he encountered most frequently in his years studying the arts, myths, and social organizations of the Kwakwaka’wakw. The most extended and penetrating account of the masks known to me was given by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1975. Lévi-Strauss’s analyzes the Dzonokwa masks at considerable length as part of an astonishingly wide-ranging and detailed account of Pacific Northwest masks generally. Here I restrict myself to what he says about the Dzonokwa masks. These masks are typically prominently or entirely black, decorated with black tufts for hairs, and have half-enclosed eyes. The mouth is pushed forward and rounded, evoking the ogress’s characteristic cry “uh! uh!” (Lévi-Strauss, pp. 61-2)

     For Lévi-Strauss artworks generally, and so also this mask, both as a type and its instances, are unintelligible if considered by themselves. Artworks and their salient features become intelligible only if first placed in appropriate comparison classes, which permits the works and their elements to be seen as part of a nested series of broad semantic systems. Within such groups, instances and features are related as transformations and inversions of each other. He initially groups the Dzonokwa masks together with another kind of mask that he treats as the most proximal inversion of the Dzonokwa, the Xwéxwé.

These latter masks are typically predominantly white, topped with stylized feathers, and feature a hanging tongue, bulging eyes, and bird-head appendages (p. 41). Considered from “the plastic point of view”, the Xwéxwé mask is “full of protrusions” and is opposed to “the Dzonokwa mask, which is all cavities” (p. 67).

     How might one move beyond ‘the plastic point of view’? What, if anything, further can be said about the artistic meaning of such works? For Lévi-Strauss further meanings are retrieved by reconstructions, from the well-documented to the speculative, of the systems of which the masks are elements. First, ethnographic observation supplies the immediate context of use of the masks in dances and ceremonies. A dancer in a Xwéxwé mask is believed to shake the ground, and so is associated with earthquakes (p. 40). The wearer of the Dzonokwa masks “wraps himself in a black blanket and sways sleepily near the door” (p. 66), behavior that is explained through consideration of the myths and stories associated with the ogress. There is no need here to summarize further Lévi-Strauss’s immensely interesting and detailed account of the semantic systems; readers (if there remain any alive besides myself) of his four-volume ‘science’ of mythology will not be surprised to learn that he relates the relevant myths first to those of neighboring groups, then to all the major groups of the Pacific Northwest, and ultimately to a system so broad that it ranges from South America to Japan and China (!). Later in the book I’ll attempt an extended account of masks as visual art and consider instances from other continents. For now I end this short post with two strictures for the philosophy of visual art: Such a philosophy must incorporate Lévi-Strauss’s findings into its account of artistic meaning, or be able to explain why such kinds of meaning should be excluded from consideration. Second, a philosophy of visual art should contain conceptual resources to aid in the interpretive task that Lévi-Strauss ignores, that is, ways of explicating the artistic meaning of single instances of artworks. I turn next to Patrick Maynard’s account of a drawing by Rembrandt to introduce this concern for particulars.

 References:

 Franz Boas, “The Use of Masks and Head Ornaments on the Northwest Coast of America” (1890), in A Wealth of Thought: Franz Boas on Native American Art (1995), ed. Aldona Jonaitis

Audrey Hawthorn, Kwakiutl Art (1979)

Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Way of the Masks (1982)

The World in an Eye, Part 3.1: Nancy Munn on Walbiri Design

     For a second example of what I’ve termed the ‘zero degree’ of artistic meaning, as well as how this zero degree gains content, consider the astonishing drawings in the sand made by some Aboriginal groups in central and southwestern Australia. The artistic practice of drawing in the sand ranges from small, impromptu illustrations accompanying oral story-telling to large (six to eighteen feet in length) depictions of totemic animals rendered with parallel wavy lines and concentric circles. (McCarthy p. 32) The larger drawings are the work of many hours and illustrate the places, travels, and incidents of ancestor beings in Dreamtime, the timeless time of mythic, ancestral events.

     The classic account of such sand drawings was of those from the Aboriginal Walbiri (or Warlpiri) group given by the anthropologist Nancy Munn. Walbiri women practice a distinctive genre of sand drawing characterized by “the rhythmic interplay of a continuous running graphic notation with gesture signs and a singsong verbal patter.” (Munn, p. 59) The drawings consist of a small lexicon of lines and enclosures; each item has a range of possible meanings that are specified contextually in use.

Among the women’s stories are accounts of dreams, which use a smaller range of elements that are also painted onto women’s bodies; these figures are often elongated to fit onto body parts, especially shoulders and breasts, surrounded by additional lines, or subjected to further decorative elaboration. (pp. 103-09) [

     By contrast, much of the graphic design accompanying men’s story-telling of mythic travel uses marks of tracks indicating particular species-ancestors, lines for paths, and circles for places. (pp. 119-28) These circle-line designs are used also on boards and stones. (p. 136)

Likewise in partial contrast to women’s drawings, the men’s particular designs are typically part of a ritual context of communicating with ancestors and are closely associated “with a single ancestor and the songs detailing the events of his track” (p. 145). The associated designs and songs are “treated as complementary channels of communication; each is a repository of narrative meaning, and the production of one may evoke the other.”

     These design elements are further incorporated into “aspects of men’s ceremonial drama, and to forms of ceremonial paraphernalia” (p. 183). In the ceremonial dramas, decorated men represent the ancestors in a camp, travelling along a track, or coming into a camp. Thus the dramas are structured by the same site-path/camp-track framework that is utilized in the designs themselves. (p. 185)

     Munn ends with some general remarks about the sand drawings, their connection with stories, and their incorporation into broader frameworks, including the differing and complementary roles of men’s and women’s arts and lives, and ultimately the function of such meaning making. The visual elements and their uses exhibit “a high degree of repetitiveness”, which allows them to be key agents of a “connective” in “the dynamic through which such forms come to penetrate the imaginations of members of a community”. For both men and women, the designs and their incorporation into broader patterns of meaning cover individuals’ bodies, extend them, and connect them with the outer, social world, itself ultimately conceived as a part of a mythic cosmos. (pp. 215-17) Her conclusion is that the “visual forms are “multivocal” condensation symbols that can project an image of dynamic society unity in microcosm”. (p. 220) Part of the philosophical will be to make sense of how it is that visual artworks can so much as come to accomplish this.

References:

Frederick D. McCarthy, Australian Aboriginal Decorative Art (1962)

Nancy Munn, Walbiri Iconography (1986)

The World in the Eye, First Draft, Part 2: The Zero Degree of Artistic Meaning

     One problem that afflicts the philosophical consideration of art has been philosophers’ consideration of a narrow range and very few actual artworks. From among the greatest modern philosophers, Immanuel Kant’s consideration of particular artworks is contained mostly in some remarks on a poem by Frederick the Great, Martin Heidegger spun out his account of art largely from reflection upon the example of ‘the’ Greek temple, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty considered at length only stylistic features of Cézanne. Relatedly, most philosophers restrict themselves to one or two kinds of art: for the unmusical Kant it was poetry and emblems, for the unmusical Heidegger poetry and painting, for Merleau-Ponty painting and literature. No great classic philosopher has given any extended consideration to, say, dance. Here we restrict ourselves in advance to the visual arts, but then what range of artworks should a philosophical consideration of distinctively artistic meaning of visual arts consider?

     Here I’ll introduce and sketch the artistic meanings of a small number of visual artworks. From among thousands of possibilities I’ve semi-arbitrarily chosen a few from a range of cultures and of various types. One criterion guiding the choices is that in each case there is extended and insightful published interpretation of the piece; I’ll summarize the interpretations and treat them as part of the evidence that a philosophical account of artistic meaning must attempt to make sense of. I see no way of initially responding to the objection that the procedure begs the questions of what a work of art is and whether these pieces are artworks. One sign of the relative success of this investigation would be that by the end of the book the objection will have melted away in the face of the evidence of the works’ artistic richness.

1. The Zafimaniry are a group of Malagasy-speaking slash-and-burn farmers in the eastern forests of Madagascar. Like the Haida of the Pacific Northwest, they are renowned as carvers. Part of their traditional carving, according to the anthropologist Maurice Bloch, is making “low reliefs or engravings of relatively elaborate geometrical patterns which cover the wooden parts of their houses—especially the shutters and, most beautifully, the three main posts.” (Bloch, p. 39)

Bloch writes that people who have written about these works have in some cases asked various Zafimaniry what they meant, and already problems arise. The question is posed in French, where the phrase usually translated into English as ‘meant’ is vouloir dire (literally, ‘try [or want] to say’). Nothing readily translates ‘want to say’ into Malagasy, so the Malagasy-speaking Bloch suggests they must have understood the question as something that translates readily into one of four senses: ‘What is the point of it?’, ‘What is the root cause of it?’, ‘What is it [a depiction] of?’ or ‘What are you doing [in making this]?’ Bloch received “rather disappointing answers” when he asked these questions: there was no point to these carved depictions of nothing. Parts, but only parts, of the carvings were said to represent something, such as a circle representing the moon. But he did receive one seemingly substantive answer carving the wood “made it beautiful [and so] ‘honor[s] the wood’. (ibid, pp. 41-2) Bloch comes to realize that the significance of the carvings is not as it were given in themselves, either taken one at a time or as a whole, but rather only in the context of the houses and the Zafimaniry understanding of the role of houses in the trajectory of a life construed as an endless passage from relative undetermination to relative determination, a passage metaphorically conceptualized and made manifest in the hardening of a house’s wood. When first built, a house has central posts and a flimsy outer wall of reeds and mats. Over time the flimsy materials are replaced with massive pieces of wood. “The house is the marriage”, and when the original occupants die their descendants will inhabit it and continue the process. The hardening of the wood is endless, because even very hard wood is carved. Thereby carving gains a conceptualization: it is “a continuation of the process of hardening and transformation” that “’honours’ the hardness of the heartwood and makes it even more evident and beautiful.” (ibid, p. 43)

     Surely there is a great deal more to be said about Zafimaniry carvings. One would certainly wish to know how the Zafimaniry evaluate particular instances, and whether particular instances at least in some cases carry further kinds of meaningfulness beyond their decorative role in metaphorizing the hardening process. And what of the significance, if any, or the shallowness of house carvings as contrasted with the relative depth of other kinds of carving? Still, Bloch’s account provides the material for some initial remarks on artistic meaning. Like these house carvings, much of the world’s visual art is decorative, where ‘decorative’ indicates that artistic work is a (conceptually) secondary elaboration of some primary material, subject, or content; decoration is always ‘decoration-of-X’. (I’ll consider decoration at length later in this book.) There is no representational content; or, if there is (as in my next example), it is unretrievable by mere visual inspection, and is rather assigned by traditional usage (here the circle is a moon; in early Chinese art it is Heaven) or by the artist. Some salience and visual attractiveness is given through the combination of the skill in making and the forms, textures, and patternings within the work, all of which are perceptually evident and bear kinds of significance as expressive of human actions (scraping, cutting, digging, filing, smoothing, etc.).

     We can think of the Zafimaniry carvings as exhibiting a kind of ‘zero degree’ of artistic meaningfulness: they lack a subject or content, and offer, in themselves and taken individually, only (!) a display of skill and design. But already, even at the ‘zero degree’, they bear and continue a history of making, a style, and existentially serious conceptualizations of themselves and of that which they decorate, all of which are perceptually available to a suitably attuned perceiver.—In my next 1000+-word post I’ll present another instance of this zero degree, the sand paintings and totemic images of the Australian Aboriginal group the Walbiri (or Warlpiri), and then consider a further degree of artistic meaningfulness in a particular kind of mask of the Pacific Northwest group the Kwakwaka’wakw (or Kwakiutl). 

References:

Maurice Bloch, “Questions not to ask of Malagasy carvings” in Essays on Cultural Transmission (2005)

The World in Your Eye: Elements of a Philosophy of Artistic Meaning in the Visual Arts, Part One

The following is the first in a series of 40-50 posts that collectively will comprise the first draft of a book on the philosophy of the visual arts. I imagine the book will go through at least three drafts, but I’ll post the first draft in 1000-or-so word segments in hopes that some people will find it interesting enough to read and along and, hopefully, comment and especially criticize.

1. A great deal of philosophical thinking about the arts might well be thought of as offering answers to the question ‘What is art?’. The question is typically further focused and narrowed in one of three ways. One prominent way is to focus on a particular artform. So a philosophy of painting asks ‘What is painting (when practiced as an art)?’, a philosophy of theater wonders ‘What is theater (practiced as an artform?’. A second kind investigates the artistic process, the actions that an artist engages in in making an artwork. A third gives the initial question an ontological flavor, and asks ‘What is a work of art?’. The last focuses on the recipient of the art, and tries to uncover and analyze distinctive attitudes or kinds of response that an appropriately attentive person exhibits in encountering an artwork; this is the world of the ‘aesthetic attitude’ or of ‘aesthetic experience’, with the further assumption that it is a distinctive feature of artwork to solicit and reward these kinds of attitudes and experiences. Each of these four further investigations must presuppose some sort of answer to the initial question of what art is; otherwise there would be no distinctive topic to investigate, that is, no way to distinguish artistic from non-artistic ways of making and perceiving.

      But for many reflective thinkers, the appeal to the concept of art is an appeal to nothing at all. One broad and prominent line of thinking is that the very concept of art, and its use in intellectual contexts, is so ideologically tainted by its origin in thinking about visual artworks in Western contexts of galleries and museums that it is worse than useless in thinking about global arts, as the concept inevitably carries with it conceptions and criteria for applying the concept that demote the vast array of global, non-gallery arts from serious consideration. Typically, this charge is not followed by the attempt to offer a reformed, ideologically untainted conception of art, but rather with the quick and unargued implication that there is no viable concept of art generally. A different line of thinking urges that there is a viable concept of art, but its scope of legitimate application is restricted to modern gallery-museum arts. So on the first line, the whole attempt to metamorphose the question ‘What is art?’ into the questions ‘What is the artform of X?’ [where X is painting or drawing or sculpture or music or theater . . . ] can’t get going, as there is no way of picking out an artform from human practices generally; while on the second line artforms, like art itself, is restricted to works destined for the refined worlds of galleries and museums.

     In this book I present a course of philosophical thinking that has few if any models or predecessors: the nature of artistic meaning, in particular in the visual arts. What is artistic meaning? One might well think that the investigation of artistic meaning inherits all the problems of determining what makes an artform a form of art, while adding the further, notorious obscurity of the concept of meaning. As John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley put it, ‘meaning’ is “[a] word so confused that it is best never used at all. More direct expressions can always be found”. (Dewey and Bentley, p. 297) In a great deal of English language philosophy since World War II, invocations of ‘meaning’ accordingly are treated as something that can be replaced with more manageable and precise conceptions. The taming of the intractable concept of meaning into something admitting of philosophical analysis involves three steps: First, ‘meaning’ is restricted to language. Then language is conceived as consisting of sentences that can be analyzed one at a time. Finally, such sentences admit of truth-or-falsity, and whatever was meant by ‘meaning’ would be captured in considering the circumstances of and ways in which sentences can be true or false. As W. V. O. Quine put it: “You have given all the meanings when you have given the truth-conditions of all the sentences.” (Quoted in Platts, p. 53) Supposedly the analysis of truth-conditions thereby clarifies and replaces the muddle of meaning.

     I go a different way. To my mind this short route to the elimination of talk about meaning does nothing to preserve or clarify the intuitions that motivated reference to meaning in art. Among such intuitions, generalized and formulated as claims about distinctive features of human life,  I include at least the following: the sense that across almost all cultures the arts are central and important (the Centrality claim); the sense that whatever needs the arts address, whatever functions they fulfill, whatever desires they satisfy, etc, cannot in many instances be addressed and fulfilled and satisfied through other human practices, such as those in the realms of economics, religion, or politics (the Irreplaceability claim); and that the Centrality and Irreplaceability of the arts can be explained in part by their possession of certain kinds of meaning that are available to suitably attuned percipients of art works. ‘Meaning’ in the relevant senses is a heterogenous group that includes various kinds of representation, expression, symbolicity, metaphoricity, solicitations to participation and/or involvement, and resonances. There is no determinate limit to what can or cannot be a kind of artistic meaning; the sole determinant for inclusion is whether in fact something contributes to the distinctive kinds of meaningfulness exhibited by artworks. A striking feature of artistic meaning is its ineffability: it cannot be exhaustively put into words or captured in a finite string of sentences.

     This philosophical exploration of artistic meaning will have three major parts: first I’ll sketch a philosophical anthropology that aims to show very basic features of human life that are presupposed by the very existence of the arts, but even more so which are reservoirs of basic kinds of meaningfulness that artworks draw from and recruit. The first of these features is embodiment, that is, having a body that exhibits front-and-back, up-and-down, bilateral symmetry, and handedness. Then in order I’ll consider gesture, the human hand, and language. Although I envision this book as part of a general philosophy of the arts, my focus here will be on the visual arts, so I’ll further give a summary account of human vision. The second part will consider very basic aspects of the making of artistic meaning, in particular its ineliminable historicity, and how meaning arises from constraints, including the nature of an artistic medium and conventions of genre and style. The third part will try to show and analyze the further factors involved in bringing together the previously canvased kinds and mechanisms of meaningfulness in order to produce the rich, non-finite kinds of meaning characteristic of visual artworks.

     Next, I’ll introduce and give brief accounts of three works of art that will serve to orient the discussions in the book. I choose these three, from among tens of thousands of possibilities, because they are among my personal favorites, because they all have attracted bodies of high-level writing and reflection, and because collectively they give a sense of the range of the visual arts. The three are the sand drawings of the Australian Aboriginal group the Warlbiri, a mask from the Pacific Northwest group the Kwakwaka’wakw (formerly referred to as the Kwakiutl), and a drawing by Rembrandt.

References:

 John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley, Knowing and the Known (1949)

Mark Platts, Ways of Meaning (1979)

On Claire Bishop’s Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today (2024)

     Claire Bishop is one of the most prominent academics in the United States whose professional field is the study of contemporary visual art. And like many such academics, she views her professional activity as ‘theorizing’ aspects of contemporary art, with a particular focus on seemingly novel aspects of very recent art. Her new book Disordered Attention is very much of a piece with this orientation. The book consists of a lengthy introduction wherein she discusses the concept of attention and introduces her central concept of ‘hybrid attention’, then of four chapters each of which presents and ‘theorizes’ what she claims is some recently emergent genre of contemporary art. I am by no means certain that the book offers much insight into very recent visual art, but Bishop’s method, examples, and observations are at the very least symptomatic of contemporary reflective thinking on their topic, and so worth knowing by anyone who seeks orientation on and understanding of these novel kinds of art. In the following short review I’ll start with what I take to by a summary of her central arguments and analyses, and then offer some critical reflections. I note in advance that at many points in reading this short book I was unsure exactly what Bishop is arguing, as well as what the intended scope and force of her claims are; but of course I’ll try to state her points in what I take to be their maximally plausible and interesting form, though it seems to me entirely possible that I am misunderstanding her claims. I shall not resist the temptation to insert occasional marks of perplexity or exasperation in brackets.

     I take her to be arguing two central claims: 1. There is an historically novel kind of attention, ‘hybrid attention’, that is the mode of viewers’ engagement solicited in some recent art (Bishop calls this “the new conditions of spectatorship” (p. 4)); and 2. There are (at least) four very recently emergent genres in contemporary visual art: (a) ‘research-based’ art presented in installations; (b) ‘performance exhibition’ wherein lengthy live performances occur in museums and galleries; (c) ‘interventions’ wherein artists attempt, both within and outside of art institutions, to capture attention with ephemeral installations or actions in order to stimulate broad discussion and debate; (d) invocations, whether in collages, paintings, photographs, installations, or performances, of modernist architecture. [One immediately notices that these four emergent ‘genres’ are quite heterogeneous, and further that prima facie (d) at least does not seem to be anything like an artistic genre, but rather more a kind of concern or topic across genres; I’ll consider this point below.] Here initially I just note that Bishop considers claims 1 and 2 to be connected in that each of the four genres demands (in very different ways) ‘hybrid attention’ from the viewer for appropriate engagement with, and understanding and appreciation of, works that are classified as instances of the genre.

     I’ll now consider the claims in more detail. First, what does Bishop mean by ‘hybrid attention’? Bishop states that in this book “attention is understood not as a universal, deep-rooted faculty of the human mind, but as a capacity that is mutable—through technology, medication, and the presence of others” (p. 5). Bishop contrasts ‘hybrid attention’ with two other historically prominent kinds of attention: ‘normative attention’, which she characterizes as “an attention directed at objects (rather than subjects), that is intellectual and cognitive (rather than sensorial and affective), that is framed in terms of ownership (‘taking possession of the mind’ [here Bishop quotes from William James’s The Principles of Psychology]) and which is individual (rather than socially or collectively constituted) (p. 8)”; and the kind of absorptive attention that she thinks is characteristic of traditional approaches, both perceptual and scholarly, to visual works of art. Normative attention is, Bishop asserts, quite a nasty piece of business: it “conforms to Enlightenment conceptions of the modern subject as conscious, rational, and disciplined. This model is, of course [of course??], paradigmatically white, patriarchal, bourgeois, colonial. It is synonymous with ownership, property, and optical mastery” (p.8 [does Bishop know what the word ‘synonymous’ means?]). Further, normative attention “assumes a normative subject—privileged, white, straight, able-bodied, volitional [?]—who confers his attention onto an exteriority thereby constituted as an object.” (p. 15) The second prominent kind of attention, which I’ll call ‘absorptive attention’, is a sub-kind of normative attention that emerges prominently in the 1870s with new ways of hanging paintings in salons, newly silent and refined behavior in museums, and with Richard Wagner’s re-organization of theatrical space in the service of encouraging “optical surrender” and “ritual immersion” (p. 13) in his operas’ audiences. In the arts absorptive attention is bound to “the depth model of a fully present beholder”  and “a modernist aesthetics of rapt enthrallment and plentitude” (p. 27). Earlier in the book Bishop writes that a ‘depth model of culture’ is one wherein “cherished objects (‘masterpieces’) . . . elicit inexhaustible attention”, inciting scholars to “spend long hours writing about such objects”, thereby [?] associating “meaning and profundity” (p. 5). Perhaps one might phrase Bishop’s general point by saying that absorptive attention is normative attention in modern arts. Hybrid attention contrasts with normative attention and its artistic form absorptive attention in abandoning the latters’ modes of engagement in favor of the audience relaxing, chatting, looking at their phones, taking photos and putting them on Instagram, and so forth.

     I turn now to the four emergent genres of contemporary visual art. Bishop is not wholly consistent in her use of terminology. At one point she says that only the first three kinds of art considered solicit hybrid attention (pp. 27-8), and that the fourth kind is not a genre but a ‘citational practice’ (p. 30). However, in a schematic table (p. 32) she classifies all four as ‘genres of practice’ that solicit different ‘modes of attention’ that are manifestly hybrid in her sense, so for consistency with her most formal statement I’ll consider them all as genres involving hybrid attention. In a number of places Bishop states that she is ‘theorizing’ the different genres. What does this mean? Bishop gives some indications of her understanding of ‘theorization’, and her practice is reasonably consistent. A genre is ‘theorized’ when (a) a short characterization is given of its central features; (b) an intra-artistic pre-history and history of its central works are sketched; (c) central works are picked out and described; (d) something of the broader institutional, social, political, and/or economic background or context of the relevant works is indicated; and (e) the central works and the genre as a whole are assessed in light of the roles they play in sustaining, fostering, or hindering an array of broader concerns, especially those relating to the destructive effects of capitalism and presumptive social progress in ethics, social mores, and rights. On what I take to be a fairly standard understanding, inquiry consisting of (a)-(c) is the normal practice of art history, (a)-(d) is the social history of art, and the full ‘theorizing’ of (a)-(e) is a complacent, academic version of critical theory, unreflective in its failure to probe, historicize, or problematize the standards and criteria invoked in (e).

     Bishop’s remarks can readily be organized under the (a)-(e) schema, as follows:

--Research-based art is a kind of visual art that spatially exhibits a great deal of textual material, along with in many cases photographs, videos, and/or films, all of which are manifestly the product of the artist’s research into a particular self-chosen topic. In many cases the materials shown are so numerous and lengthy that no viewer/reader could reasonably be expected to look at and/or read all of it. No narrative is presented, and no conclusion is insinuated. The genre emerges as the confluence of three earlier though historically quite recent artforms: photodocumentary, the film essay, and Conceptual art (p. 41). There are as of now three phases of such art: an initial phase exemplified by Renée Green’s [profoundly dreary] Import/Export Funk Office of 1992, a mixed-media exhibition including books, magazines, newspapers, videos, cassettes, and various pedestrian wooden structures; a second phase that partially overlaps the first phase and is distinguished by its deployment of seemingly outmoded technologies such as slideshows and embrace of narrative, as exemplified by the work of Mario García Torres including A Film Treatment (Share-e-Nau Wanderings) (2006), which uses faxes, slides, and audio recording to present Torres’s attempts to locate a certain hotel in Afghanistan; and a third phase which largely restricts itself to internet research, and presents its materials as an aggregation of data that the viewer is expected to sift through, though to no particular end, and as exemplified by Wolfgang Tillmans’s ‘Truth Study Center’ of many iterations starting in 2005.

The social precondition of such [disheartening and excruciatingly boring] art is the rise of doctoral programs for artists (p. 38). Bishop for the most part evaluates this genre with two criteria: Does it or does it not undermine the presumptive authority of the artist and so ‘decenter the subject’? And is it worthwhile for a viewer to engage with it? The first and third phases do such undermining, the second doesn’t, but all of this is trumped by the fact that the work is so diffuse. Against these dispiriting works, Bishop counterposes the work of Walid Raad and Anna Boghiguian which involves some research, but which synthesizes the research with a personal narrative and presents the synthesis in such a manner that a viewer is allowed “a lived, sensuous encounter that has been digested” (p. 72). Good on Raad and Boghiguian, the reader sighs; but how do these works fit into Bishop’s three phases? And if they don’t fit, does that mean that they aren’t actually part of the genre? Or alternatively, does it mean that Bishop’s description is incomplete, and indeed omits what should be the central instances of the genre, that is, those that succeed artistically?

     In order not to overly try the reader’s patience, I’ll describe the quite similar accounts of the remaining three genres more briefly. Performance exhibitions emerge from the precedent of Merce Cunningham’s events, which were multi-media presentations of his choreographed dances off-stage in museums and other public spaces. An exemplary work is Maria Hassabi’s PLASTIC of 2015, consisting of lengthy  performances of very slow dances of crawling the floors and inching down stairs. Hybrid attention is particularly evident with viewers taking photos [and fleeing the museum?]. Bishop rather likes this, as the viewer is uncertain how to act (p. 109), and the whole thing is quite sociable with all the resultant photos and chatter online. Interventions are “self-initiated actions that address the polis through the use of public space, employing an everyday visual language, and harnessing the media to force an issue into public consciousness and spark debate” (p. 115) [In what sense is this an artistic genre? And what does Bishop intend in using the Greek term polis instead of, say, ‘city’ or ‘urban environment’?]

A recent and well-known such intervention was Pussy Riot’s Mother of God, Drive Putin Away in a cathedral in Moscow in 2012. Bishop seems to approve of many interventions because effective in their provocations, but is seemingly troubled by the fact that on her own account the storming of the U. S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 might plausibly count as an intervention.

The final genre [or is it strategy?] involves contemporary artists’ invoking modernist architecture, such as in Kcho’s To the Eyes of History (1992-95) and Ai Weiwei’s Fountain of Light (2007), a genre-or-strategy that Bishop finds typically and lamentably nostalgic. Positive counter-instances are provided by the widely known ‘monuments’ of Thomas Hirschhorn, which provide a “collision of demographics and activities” that create “a social montage “ that is disjunctive and beautiful (p. 192).

     Having already signaled my dismay about a number of Bishop’s formulations—her unexamined and complacent use of fashionable clichés; her sloppiness in formulations; inconsistencies resulting from the failure to think through her basic points and concepts-- by way of criticism I’ll restrict myself to what I take to be a central conceptual problem with the book, namely her presentation and understanding of the concept of attention. She cites James’s formulation of attention as an aspect of human psychology that involves selection, focalization, and sustained awareness as somehow a distinctive mark of all the socially despised types of liberal academics—the white, the privileged, the bourgeois, the colonialist. But surely attention is an aspect of human psychology; and if James’s formulation is irredeemably tainted ideological, then how ought one formulate what attention is? I can see nothing problematic with James’s formulation as an initial orientation to the topic, and Bishop provides no reason, evidence, or argumentation to suggest otherwise, other than the bare assertion that it is of course white, bourgeois, etc. One might with equal justification retort that Bishop’s assertion is of course rubbish. Further, one might think that her inability to formulate the conception of hybrid attention as something other than looking at something + looking at one’s phone is evidence of her lack of an intellectually plausible conception of attention per se. And finally, on her own account successful works in her chosen genres, such as those of Walid Raad, do rely for their artistic effectiveness on synthesis of heterogeneous materials and perceptually graspable presentations. This suggests that hybrid attention is at most an aspect of contemporary sensibilities that may—or may not—be incorporated into and function as an aspect of a successful work of contemporary art, rather than hybrid attention being somehow the core manner of encounter with (some) works of contemporary art. Bishop needs to go back to the drawing board (or whatever its digital equivalent is), read the basic literature on attention and on aesthetic response, and re-think her points accordingly.

References:

Claire Bishop, Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today (2024)

William James, Principles of Psychology (1890)