In the previously posted two parts of this piece, I urged two principal points with regard to concept of artistic expression in the modern period: 1. The concept of ‘expression’ has played a variety of roles in different accounts of art, and that its two most prominent roles have been (a) as a mark of the concept of art, and indeed as a proposed necessary and sufficient condition for something being a work of art; and (b) as a prominent, but by no means necessary or universal, kind of artistic meaning; and 2. A salient way in which a particular conception of expression has pervaded artistic thinking of the past two hundred years is in what M. H. Abrams called the ‘expressive theory’, wherein a work of art is conceptualized as an expression of the mental states—feeling, emotions, and moods—of the artist who made the work, and that these mental states ‘infect’ (in Tolstoy’s influential term) the mind of a suitably prepared and attuned recipient in any successful action of artistic communication. I turn now to the consideration of what seems to be a major shift in these conceptualizations and usages of the concept of expression around 1960. One might think that radicality of this shift, which seems to result in the broad abandonment of the expressive theory, is one of the marks of the end of the modern period in the arts, and marks the beginning of a new period, nowadays usually referred to as ‘contemporary art’, and it does seem that the particular conceptualization of modern art that Meyer Schapiro so brilliantly laid out (as discussed in the previously posted part 2) loses its social actuality around 1960. On the other hand, the expressive theory certainly survives to this day, if only in an etiolated and fragmentary way in the common-sense thought that all art is in some sense a kind of self-expression.
Perhaps the most common view of the beginning of distinctively contemporary visual art is that it arises with the work of Andy Warhol, in particular his silk screens from the years 1962 to 1965, such as his numerous pieces consisting of repeated, blown-up images of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, or of instantly recognizable instances of everyday industrialized commodities such as Campbell’s soup cans. An enormous amount has been written about these works, but for purposes of considering their role in contributing to the demise of the expressive I turn to the classic review by the poet and critic David Antin from 1966. In his review Antin attempts to describe and analyze what he calls “the most curious aspects” of Warhol’s work which arise as if out of an examination of the statement “An image is a proposition about reality.” Antin notes several salient characteristics of Warhol’s works: the faces in the images he reproduces and multiplies are for the most part presented frontally; the images are enlarged; the images are typically presented in a way that omits their context; and the repeated images are unlike, in that they are printed with different degrees of clarity, and the coloring of the images changes from instance to instance, and in a seemingly arbitrary manner. Because the figures presented are instantly recognizable, and the operations of mechanical reproduction, repetition, and arbitrary application of somewhat misaligned coloring evoke extended mechanical and chemical processes to which an original image is subjected, Antin declares that Warhol’s central interest is in “the deteriorated image,” and that in Warhol’s hands this type of image is intrinsically enigmatic because “there is no apparent context to which it can be related, and yet the scale, the centrality suggest that there is some context.” One kind of context that would provide the image with intelligibility would be a narrative context: if the depicted faces could be seen as playing a role in an intelligible sequence of actions, the faces would thereby gain some determinate expression as a manifestation of the person’s reaction to some action or actions. Yet for Warhol’s most disturbing images, such as the Marilyns, there is some context, some “sense of hidden meaning . . . enhanced by public tragedy . . . Surely lurking somewhere behind it is some cue, some information communicating a private agony.” Despite the images’ ‘deteriorated’ quality, we maintain some “belief in the moment of truth made visible.” In light of our previous discussion of Schapiro’s account of modern art, we could say that something of that art’s basic assumption of the physiognomic and expressive character of marks and images is retained. But while the assumption is mobilized, the viewer’s desire for some determinate expression is never satisfied: “Somewhere in the image there is a proposition. It is unclear.” This way in which everything in Warhol’s work of this period conspires to incite a desire that it never satisfies seems to fit comfortably under the philosopher Bence Nanay’s recent suggestion for characterizing artistic profundity as a quality of “actively challenging any straightforward interpretative activity (while at the same time nudges [sic] you to keep on trying to interpret it).”
In order to see something of how this break-up of the expressivist theory in contemporary art plays out, let’s consider the work of the painter Frank Bowling, in whose work the key assumption of the expressivist theory is rejected and heroically exposed. Bowling was born in British Guiana in 1934, and moved to London in 1953. Bowling was a late starter though rapid learner, only beginning to paint and draw in the mid-late 1950s, and entering art school in 1958. Already by 1962 the art critic and historian Norbert Lynton identified Bowling in print as “an expressionist of striking power and individuality” and noted that “[Bowling] draws his material from immediate experience, and endows that material with a passionate vividness that makes self-identification unavoidable.” (quoted in Gooding, p. 37) In the mid-1960s Bowling moved to New York City, where he was closely involved with major figures in poetry and the visual arts, including the painter Larry Rivers and, in the early 1970s, the art critic Clement Greenberg. He spent several years in the late 1960s attempting to align himself with the emerging Black Arts movement, the fruit of which were a number of large paintings of maps, primarily of South America or Africa, done over with largely monochrome washes. By the early 1970s he rejected the premises of Black Arts ideology, stating in 1976 “I spent the from late ’67 to ’71 suffering through the whole nonsense about Black Art. I used up an awful lot of physical and psychic energy trying to get that together, and I found most of it had nothing to do with my real self . . . there is no Black Art. There is Classical or Tribal African Art, but not Black Art. I believe that the Black soul, if there can be such a thing, belongs in Modernism. Black people are a quite new and original people.” (quoted in Gooding, p. 78; note Bowling’s affirmation that his art should and does have ‘something to do’ with his ‘real self’) In 1972 Bowling abandoned figuration, never to return to it, in favor of large abstract canvases that initially evoked atmospheric fields and horizons with broad bands of monochrome mists. By the late 1970s the application of the paint became denser, and gravitational pulls in varying directions emerged as orientations multiplied and became less certain. Color and its seemingly infinite permutations through expanse, saturation, juxtaposition, and overlaying became Bowling’s focus. The question then arises: how might this trajectory, culminating with the particularly distinguished body of work of the past three decades, be understood as of a piece with Bowling’s interest in an art that has ‘something to do’ with his real self?
I do not know how to give anything like a fully satisfying answer to this question, but part of the answer must, I think, involve some consideration of a single piece of writing that Bowling has cited a number of times as particularly important to him. This piece is an essay by the philosopher Richard Wollheim (whose work on artistic meaning was briefly canvassed in the earlier second part of this lecture) published in 1964 entitled ‘On Expression and Expressionism’. It’s certainly unusual that a working artist would consider such a difficult piece of academic writing as central to his work. This essay was Wollheim’s first attempt at making sense of the obscure concept of expression in art; over the following thirty-five years he was to devote several papers and chapters of books to the topic, most of which develop a positive account of artistic expression as a variety of artistic meaning that drew from the human capacity to perceive parts of nature as embodying emotions, with the additional point that the realized intentions of the artist provide a criterion of correct perception of expression in non-natural, artistic contexts. This first attempt by Wollheim, one that made such an impression upon Bowling, is distinguished from his later writings on the topic in its largely negative and questioning character: the last page of the essay contains ten sentences that end with question marks! I restrict consideration of this intricately argued piece to points that touch on aspects of the expressivist theory. Wollheim begins with a discussion from the opening pages of an “odd and penetrating” book by the psychoanalyst Marion Milner, published under the pseudonym Joanna Field, entitled On Not Being Able to Paint. Milner’s book describes her difficulties in making drawings and paintings that successfully expressed the moods and ideas she intended to express; indeed, she found that her pictures expressed ‘the opposite’ of what she intended. Wollheim then pursues the question of what it would mean to (successfully) express one’s emotions in a work of art, something we might attempt to indicate by saying in a highly metaphorical way that the artist has ‘put’ “a particular feeling or emotion into an object of activity.” (273) Characterizing expression in this manner involves two distinct items--an activity (say, of painting), and a result of the activity (say, a mark)—in a determinate relationship. Now, what we have called the expressivist theory, and what Wollheim touches on in a reference to the account of abstract expressionist painting influentially given by the critic Harold Rosenberg, assumes that “the transmission of expressiveness [passes] from activity to trace.” As we have seen, this is the key claim of the expressivist theory, from which follows its characterization of the work of art and of the appropriate activity of the viewer or reader. That is, on this account the character of the activity of making embodies some mental state of the artist, and this same mental state is expressed in the work that results from that activity. But how can this happen? Wollheim suggests that such expressiveness can only arise as a result of the artist’s use of the specific characteristics of the material that is worked, and out of the specific manner of the work. And these are not something that can be fully determined in advance. Since the same sort of (expressive) activity could give rise to qualitatively different expressions, “we must conclude that there is no necessary transmission of expressiveness from activity to trace.” (281) More securely grounded is the transmission of expressiveness from trace to activity: to perceive and appreciate artistic expressiveness, one does not begin with observed activity of an artist, and then attribute expressiveness to the resultant remark; rather some playing a particular role, someone called ‘the spectator’ (who could be the artist herself playing the role) must first see the mark, and in seeing it, judge it an instance of successful expression. The spectator may then infer back from mark to expressive activity, expressive, that is, of the sort of activity from which that very mark would result. Here, in this initial essay, Wollheim goes no further, except to raise difficulties in the form of a series of questions for the assumptions behind the idea that artistic expression could be the result of an artist painting in a manner guided by rules.
One might think that Wollheim’s arguments in philosophy against the idea that artistic expression flows from activity to mark loosely harmonize with the widespread rejection around 1960 in the arts of the kinds of modern poetics in which the expressivist theory finds its home, in Warhol and many others. But how might this particular essay of Wollheim’s figured in Bowling’s determination to pursue his ‘real self’ as a Black modernist who works outside the framework of Black Art? In the forthcoming final part of this lecture, I’ll address, though not solve, this problem, and further consider in the early work of Nam June Paik and the recent work of the dance-theater artist Carol Trindade a hitherto unmentioned kind of artistic expressiveness prominent in contemporary art.
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References:
David Antin, “Warhol: The Silver Tenement” (1966) in Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature 1966 to 2005 (2011)
Joanna Field (Marion Milner), On Not Being Able to Paint (1950)
Mel Gooding, Frank Bowling (2021)
Bence Nanay, “Looking for Profundity (in All the Wrong Places)” in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 79, Issue 3, Summer 2021
Harold Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters’ (1952) in The Tradition of the New (1962)
Richard Wollheim, ‘On Expression and Expressionism’ (1964) in Revue Internationale de Philosophie