In four previous blog posts I have considered Paul Crowther’s recent book Theory of the Art Object, with a focus on his account of sculpture. A guiding question has been: Can Crowther’s account, or indeed any account of art and art forms that starts by drawing distinctions between painting as a two-dimensional art and sculpture as a three-dimensional art, make sense of the novel kinds of artworks characteristic of contemporary visual art? As argued in the first part of this review, Rosalind Krauss’s canonical account of recent sculpture collapses upon examination. Further reflection suggests that her account needs, but does not offer, an account of spatial arts so that the idea of an ‘expanded field’ might gain some determinate sense; then the ‘field’ that is ‘expanded’ would be the field of spatial arts. Having examined Crowther’s conceptions of sculpture, assemblage, and installation in some detail, and having considered some conceptually challenging works of Giuseppe Penone, I’ll conclude by considering three questions: A. Is Crowther’s account superior to its competitors? B. Does Crowther’s account provide a basic conceptual repertoire sufficient for making sense of contemporary sculpture? And C. Why might one think that understanding contemporary visual art so much as requires an account of art forms generally, and of sculpture in particular?
A’. Much of art criticism, theorizing, and philosophizing about contemporary visual art proceeds in the absence of any articulate account of traditional art forms such as painting, drawing, and sculpture. Considerably more attention has been given to presumptively novel art forms such as video, installation, and digital art, although theorizing about such new art forms is rarely if ever accompanied by considerations of what makes a form an art form, or what characteristics art forms have generally. So a conception of spatial arts that would fill the lacuna in Krauss’s account is not readily available. As discussed in an earlier post, Crowther’s own account stands in a long, though sparsely populated, tradition of accounts of sculpture beginning with Herder’s in the second half of the eighteenth century. One problem that plagues this tradition is its adventitious concern with the sense of touch, and correlatively the alleged existence of distinctively tactile values specific to sculpture.
To my knowledge the only recent potential competitor to Crowther’s account is one offered about twenty years ago by the philosopher Robert Hopkins, itself based upon indications from Susanne Langer a half century before. Langer characterizes sculpture as follows: “A piece of sculpture is a center of three-dimensional space. It is a virtual kinetic volume, which dominates a surrounding space, and this environment derives all proportions and relations from it, as the actual environment does from one’s self . . . Sculpture is literally the image of kinetic volume in sensory space.” (Langer pp. 91-2, as quoted in Hopkins) Hopkins considers at length every point in Langer’s characterization and invokes potential counter-examples, especially abstract sculptures the application to which of the core sculptural characteristic of possessing ‘a virtual kinetic volume’ seems especially obscure. A particular problem is locating and explicating what is ‘kinetic’ in the sculpture: is it the work qua work, or the work’s subject, that is, what is represented by the work? And if the latter, then how does a Langer-type account make sense of abstract sculpture? Still, he thinks Langer’s account is illuminating, but needs at least three major qualifications: (a) At points Langer seems to recognize, very much in the manner of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that “all visual experience is experience of ‘kinetic volume’, i.e. is permeated by a sense of possible movement and action. And this includes pictorial experience, the experience in which we grasp the content of pictures.” But at other points, including in her explicit account of sculpture just cited, she seems to treat the perception of sculpture as distinctive in its recruitment of corporeality and movement. Consequently, (b) Langer has failed to clarify the core experience of sculpture, that is, the viewer’s encounter with a three-dimensional work, and a fortiori has failed to note and explicate the role of the imagination in this encounter. On Hopkins account the distinction between pictorial seeing and sculptural seeing has more to do with the kind of concern with ‘organization’ invoked by sculpture. This sort of imaginative activity has to do with the viewer’s centrally imaging the sculpture’s potentials for movement. Hopkins ruefully notes that this characteristic in turn requires explication that he cannot provide, but still thinks “that nonetheless our grasp on Langer’s account is sufficiently tight for us to assess it.” A key point of this assessment is (c), the scope of such an account. Hopkins suggests “that the notion of sculpture is subject to too many pressures—from the etiology of the works in question, the form of representation they exhibit, and indeed the aesthetic satisfactions they offer—for the class to be genuinely unified.”
Comparing Langer’s/Hopkins’s account of sculpture with Crowther’s, one might well think that the former account adds nothing that is not in Crowther’s account, and that further Crowther offers a richer conceptual repertoire for understanding contemporary sculpture. The central notion of Langer’s account, that of ‘virtual kinetic form’, remains unclarified, as Hopkins himself insists. The Langer/Hopkins account offers no analogue or replacement for Crowther’s insistence of the kind of making involved as central to the understanding of what makes a practice an art form. Crowther’s account explicitly acknowledges the limitations of scope that Hopkins notes in (c). And whereas Hopkins’s account simply considers an unordered array of potential counter-examples, Crowther’s account, in its distinctions of sculpture from assemblage and installation, offers the kind of historically sensitive finer grain that must be included in explanations of contemporary visual art.
B’. Can Crowther’s account then make sense of the distinctive forms and contents of contemporary sculpture? The answer is given in my consideration in the previous post of Penone’s sculpture. What is further needed for such explanations is some recognition of the way that in much modern and contemporary sculptural art the very framework for the intelligibility the artwork becomes part of the explicit content of the piece. In addition to the points from Fisher and Steinberg discussed in my previous post, the philosopher David Davies has urged a similar point with regard to recent art generally: working out the possible meanings of a ‘late-modern’ piece “take[s] the form of a narrative which serves not merely to contextualize an artistic vehicle, but to identify what the artistic vehicle is, given what is presented to the receiver in the gallery. It is, I think distinctive of late modern art that such an identifying narrative is required to make an individual piece available for appreciation, whereas in the case of traditional works, no such narrative is necessary for individual works since the identify of the artistic vehicle is given by an understanding of the artistic medium to which the work belongs.” (Davies, pp. 152-3) If something like these points urged by Fisher, Steinberg, and Davies are right, then Crowther’s account of sculpture, in particular of the typical content of contemporary sculptures, needs supplementing with concepts of practice, series, and concept/conceptual art; but I cannot see that any part of his account as given needs radical revision or replacement.
C’. And finally, why bother with traditional art forms like sculpture in thinking about contemporary visual art? Much contemporary theorizing about the visual arts seems to presuppose one of the following: either the concept of art is useless or even harming in thinking about contemporary cultural works; or the basic conceptual structure required for explanation is just the concept of art plus individual artworks; or the previous needs supplementing with just two recent super-genres, installation and performance. One point to consider is that in practice (so it seems to me) there is no sharp boundary among the concepts of art form, genre, and (artistic uses of a) medium. Some writers use one of these terms, some another, and some treat two or more as extensionally equivalent. Sometimes the term ‘genre’ is used for the broadest artistic classifications within the concept of art; Langer, for example, refers to tragedy and comedy as genres. So another point to consider is that the point of invoking genres in explanations applies mutatis mutandis to art forms like sculpture. Existing accounts of genre are particularly rich and well-developed, owing perhaps to the canonical formulations given by Northrop Frye in The Anatomy of Criticism. There Frye argued that the core of an artistic genre is what he called ‘the radical of presentation’, which is a particular configuration among artist, work, and audience; Frye gives particular emphasis on the kind of audience invoked, as Tzvetan Todorov noted in his influential critical account of Frye. One recognizes immediately that Crowther’s account of sculpture conforms to the model of the radical of presentation. Todorov supplies a key point for assessing the importance of the concept of genre and by extension the concept of art form: “failing to recognize the existence of genres is equivalent to claiming that a literary work does not bear any relationship to already existing works. Genres are precisely those relay-points by which the work assumes a relation with the universe of literature.” (Todorov, p. 8) And likewise with sculpture: invoking the art form of sculpture in the context of contemporary visual art brings in train something of the history of sculpture, and so the concern with the range and types of sculptural achievement, orienting models and counter-models, of possible latent values in contemporary works, and the sense of alternatives. Accordingly, the currently unfashionable invocation of histories of genres and art forms in interpreting, understanding, evaluating, and appreciating contemporary visual art might well be thought of as in the service of re-vivifying for our desolate world something of the most central pleasures in the arts. As Meyer Schapiro put it, these include the pleasures of collective and cooperative seeing out which arise kinds of intense and revelatory experiences not otherwise available: “Critical seeing, aware of the incompleteness of perception, is explorative and dwells on details as well as on the large aspects that we call the whole. It takes into account others’ seeing; it is a collective and cooperative seeing and welcomes comparison of different perceptions and judgments. It also knows moments of sudden revelation and intense experience of unity and completeness which are shared in others’ scrutiny.” (Schapiro, p. 49) Part of the achievement of Crowther’s book is to contribute to the possible re-vivification of such experiences.
References:
Paul Crowther, Theory of the Art Object (2020)
David Davies, ‘Telling Pictures: The Place of Narrative in Late Modern ‘Visual Art’’, in Philosophy and Conceptual Art (2007), ed. Peter Goldie and Elizabeth Schellekens
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957)
Robert Hopkins, ‘Sculpture and Space’ in Imagination, Philosophy and the Arts (2003), ed. Matthew Kieran and Dominic Lopes
Suzanne Langer, Feeling and Form (1953)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (1945)
Meyer Schapiro, ‘On Perfection, Coherence, and Unity of Form and Content’ (1966) in Theory and Philosophy of Art; Style, Artist, and Society (1994)
Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1973)