The following is the first of four parts of a condensed proto-draft of a future lecture on expression in contemporary art:
How might we approach the topic of expression in art? One prominent approach in philosophizing about the arts begins with asking the question ‘What is art?’, and then seeking an answer in the form of a definition that states the necessary and sufficient conditions for a thing being an instance of art. A successful definition-centered account of art must then further provide some mechanisms or rules of judgment whereby instances of are distinguishable from two other classes of things. One heterogeneous class of things would ‘ordinary’ objects such as everyday actions, artifacts, and naturally occurring objects. So the account must provide reliable means of relevantly distinguishing, on the one hand, ordinary monochrome exterior walls and my joyful rhythmic hopping at the thought of the imminent demise of capitalism, from on the other hand a painting by Barnett Newman and the performance of a dance choreographed by Twyla Tharp; the latter, and not the former, are instances of art, and the account must provide some account of why. A great many of such accounts have been offered in the past century, and the story of these proposals and their seeming defeat through counter-examples is by now a standard topic in academic teaching. For this line of thinking ‘expression’ plays the role of a failed answer to the question ‘What is art?’, one that was offered in the wake of the great shift in European artistic sensibility around the turn of the nineteenth century, a shift that was famously described by M. H. Abrams the replacement of the theory that art is fundamentally an imitation of nature to the new Romantic theory that art is an expression, especially of the mind, sensibility, moods, and emotions of the artist. In terms of emblematic metaphors, this is the shift from conceiving art as a mirror to conceiving it as a lamp. So a Romantic answer to the question ‘What is art?’ would be something like ‘art = an artifact or performance that expresses the mind (mental states, emotions, etc.) of the artist’, and in this crude statement it would immediately fall to counter-examples like my joyful hopping.
A second kind of definition-centered account would be one where the definition does not primarily state characteristics that are intrinsic to the concept or its bearers, but also and primarily characteristics that are extrinsic or delimitational. (on the distinction with specific reference to the concept of art, see Binkley 1976). So Hegel argues that there are three sorts of practices that embody what he calls ‘Absolute Spirit’, religion, art, and philosophy, and that these three are differentiated in terms of their relative manner of embodiment in images and language. Analogously, Claude Lévi-Strauss treats art and myth as alternative modes of the broader activity he calls ‘bricolage’, ways of putting heterogeneous things together with a set of finite tools not made for that particular task of composition. Lévi-Strauss contraposes ‘mythical reflection’ as a process wherein a bricoleur develops “structured sets, not directly out of other structured sets [in particular out of bits of language, specifically “the rubble of earlier social discourse”] (Lévi-Strauss p. 25), but from the residues and debris of events”, over against art which through bricolage sets up scale-models of the world, addressed to human beings who, through contemplation, come to form supplementary perspectives on what is presented in the model (pp. 28-9). The concept of expression typically plays no distinctive role in these accounts, as much of the conceptual work involved in constructing them will involve characterizing the distinctive aims, media, and manner of treating materials in the various large-scale practices (myth and art for Lévi-Strauss; religion, art, and philosophy for Hegel).
A different class of approaches starts from the thought that the concept of art per se is too indeterminate or too complex or too historically variable to serve as the focus of inquiry; a more secure focus for reflection is the concept of artistic meaningfulness, either in general across art forms, or in particular as embodied in distinctive, concrete art forms and practices such as painting or sculpture. Perhaps the most elaborated and sophisticated member of this sub-class of ways of framing the issue comes from the philosopher Richard Wollheim. In an initial formulation he invokes Lévi-Strauss’s account of bricolage as provided a proto-image of the creative process in art wherein materials at hand acquire (further) meaning. He formulates this as ‘the bricoleur problem’, “why certain arbitrarily identified stuffs or process should be vehicles of art.” (Wollheim 1980, p. 43) In a major later writing he narrows and focuses the bricoleur problem into the question of how artistic paintings acquire meaning. Wollheim characterizes the process whereby meaningfulness accrues to pictorial making as ‘thematization’, where in marking a surface an artist notices features—the mark, the surface, the edge--, and is guided in their further marking by the goal of endowing the emerging picture with content, and this in diverse ways. (Wollheim 1987, pp. 19-23) Content in artistic painting draws from three great sources in human capacities: the human ability to see and recognize something in a marked surface, as expressed, for example, when one looks at a drawing and sees a lion; the ability to see things as expressive of emotions, as when, for example, one looks at a rainy landscape and sees it as melancholy; and the capacity to experience visual pleasure, as when, for example, one sees a picture of a domestic interior, and recognizes something of the real thing in its depiction, and simultaneously something of the depiction in the real thing. (Wollheim 1987, pp. 46-100). So on Wollheim’s account, expression is a major characteristic, though not invariably one, of painting practiced as an art form.
In the next forthcoming installment here we’ll consider the particular conception of expression embodied in major aspects of modern art, and how that conception seems to collapse in prominent instances of visual art around 1960 and shortly thereafter.
References:
Timothy Binkley, “Deciding about Art” in Culture and Art (1976), edited by Lars Aagaard-Mogensen
G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on Fine Art (delivered 1820’s)
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Wild Thought ((1962) 2021)
Richard Wollheim, Art and its objects ((first edition 1968) 1980) and Painting as an Art (1987)