In my previous blog post, I began a critical consideration of the philosopher Paul Crowther’s recent book Theory of the Art Object. In this book, as in several others in the past two decades, Crowther explicitly aims to present an account of both art generally and specific art forms, such as painting, sculpture, and drawing, that is at odds with much of contemporary theorizing about the arts, both from philosophers and art historians. Crowther’s most general complaint about most contemporary theorizing about the arts is that it is reductivist, in the sense that it treats the meaning of individual works of art, art forms, and art generally as exhaustively given in their particular uses; so the meaning of an artwork might be on one account the political use to which the work is put in a political context, or on another account the identity-affirming use to which it is put in a particular community. Crowther insists by contrast that a philosophical account of art and the arts must explicate what it is about artworks that so much as allows them to be put to these various context-specific uses. On Crowther’s account the basic feature or features of artworks qua artworks are those that give rise to the distinctive fascination that works of art possess; in turn, it is this fascination that is recruited to particular uses in different contexts (political, religious, communal, etc.) in order that the works might be attractive to their intended audiences. Crowther further claims that the elements that produce this fascination, beyond whatever particular uses they are put, bear in their artistic employment distinctive kinds of existential or metaphysical meanings, especially meanings relating to human embodiment and finitude.
As I indicated in my first post on Crowther’s book, I’ll focus on his account of sculpture and the related spatial arts of installation and land art. A guiding question is: Does Crowther’s account offer resources for understanding and appreciating the peculiarly dynamic and extended nature of contemporary sculpture, resources that are unavailable in the canonical accounts given by Rosalind Krauss starting in the late 1970s? Crowther’s account of the place of sculpture among other spatial arts is straight-forward: He first distinguishes painting from sculpture as different kinds of spatial art, the former an art of coloring two-dimensional surfaces, the latter an art of working three-dimensional materials. He then interestingly distinguishes sculpture from assemblage: In a sculpture every part is “governed by the character of the whole” and accordingly each part’s “character is meant to be absorbed within the aesthetic effect of the whole.” (p. 57) By contrast in an assemblage the parts retain something of their existence prior to their incorporation into an artwork. The parts of an assemblage appear to be ‘found’. (ibid) A major sub-genre of assemblage art is installation art, whose distinctive aim is to “recontextualize any space where it is shown” and so the relation of the work to its context of display is internal to the meaning of the work. (p. 59) Finally, land art is something different than sculpture or installation outdoors in that it is not simply placing something within a pre-given natural setting, but in addition the artwork creates a place, which Crowther characterizes as “something that envelops the body, offering many different aspects to be comprehended in relation to the work’s overall unity.” (p. 79) I take Crowther to be getting at something like this: in an outdoor sculpture or installation the core of artistic meaningfulness arises from the viewer’s visual and kinaesthetic access to and mobile exploration of the work, even when, as in installation, the work’s setting is an element of the work. But in land art the viewer grasps herself more immediately as part of an indeterminately large setting; the viewer is herself placed, and placed in unsurveyably vast terrestrial, atmospheric, oceanic, astronomic, and cosmological settings.
Before proceeding to test Crowther’s conceptualization against the puzzling work of one of the greatest of contemporary sculptors, Giuseppe Penone, I pause to make two comments on Crowther’s categorization:
A. Crowther ignores the history of the concept of sculpture. The relevant history of Crowther’s conception of sculpture begins in 1766 with Laocoön, the much-discussed treatise of the playwright, theologian, and theorist of the arts Gotthold Lessing. There Lessing developed and explicated the contrast between poetry as a temporal art and painting as a spatial art. In Lessing’s work the concept of sculpture is recessive and minimally treated as an instance of spatial art, whose exemplary art form is painting. The philosopher Herder responded quickly and with characteristic vigor, initially in 1769 in the first and fourth of his Critical Forests, and then with the treatise Sculpture in 1778. Like Crowther nearly 250 years later, Herder asserts that different art forms have correlatively different effects; in a characteristically florid and hectoring passage, Herder writes that “Both [painting and sculpture] are supposed [by others] to serve a single sense and to raise a single aspect of our soul! Nothing could be falser than this! I have closely considered both art forms and have found that no single law, no observation, no effect of the one fits the other without some difference or delimitation.” (p. 42) Herder immediately proceeds to an account that bedevils the next centuries of art theorizing, wherein each art form is supposed to be correlated with a single sense: painting—sight; music—hearing; sculpture—touch. (p. 43) This correlation of sculpture with touch continues through the mid-20th century with Herbert Read’s The Art of Sculpture, where, in terms closely echoing Herder, Read claims that painting concerns ‘sight-sense’ and sculpture ‘touch-sense’. (Read, (1953), p. 48) Read quotes William James’s unfortunate statement that “touch-space is one world; sight space is another world. The two worlds have no essential or intrinsic congruence” (James (1892), quoted at Read p. 47), a thought that, combined with the schema that assigns each major art form to a single sense, prevents one from grasping the evident point that sculpture is also a visual art, and that both painting and sculpture can well be understood as spatial arts. So one issue for anyone else who wishes to give a philosophical account of sculpture will be to grasp the distinctiveness of the appeals to tactility in sculpture while integrating such appeals with vision, as well as the viewer’s bodily mobility. Crowther wisely simply abandons the Herder/Read one art-one sense schema, but with it the persistent intuition that artistic sculpture typically recruits aspects of the sense of touch in a relatively intense and heightened degree in comparison with other art forms. (I’ll return to this issue at the end of my review and compare Crowther’s account of sculpture with what seems to me the most illuminating contemporary account, one offered by the philosopher Robert Hopkins as developed from some resources introduced by Susanne Langer).
B. Along with ignoring the history of the concept of sculpture, Crowther ignores the historicity of the artistic genre of sculpture. What I mean is that nothing in Crowther’s account registers the fact that art forms are not obviously universal, and that art forms emerge, develop, and (perhaps) decay. To this concern Crowther might well readily reply that the evidence of the so-called ‘Lion-Man of Hohlenstein’, an ivory statuette recently re-dated to around 40,000 BCE, suggests that sculpture is as archaic and basic an art form as painting, drawing, and music. Nonetheless, to show the sort of conceptual considerations that Crowther ignores, consider a recent account of the emergence of artistic genres given by the philosophers Michel-Antoine Xhignesse. Xhignesse treats artistic genres under the conception of ‘art-kinds’. Such kinds, he argues, are sub-set of the much broader class of ‘conventions’. Out of Xhignesse’s intricate and innovative account I only select and note here his claim that art-kinds have a particular historical profile: (a) Art-kinds emerge in particular historical and social contexts as a matter of sheer contingency; there is nothing in the nature of human beings and human social and cultural life that determines that say, painting and sculpture should be considered arts and a fortiori distinctive arts. As Xhignesse writes: “It is not arbitrary, of course, that our artistic practices typically exploit features of the human sensory apparatus rather than, e.g., sense-modalities only available to star-nosed moles. But the particular forms that this exploitation takes, and the priority we assign to different ways of exploiting the same sense-modalities, are, ultimately, arbitrary and historically contingent.” (b) Conventions, and so art-kinds, arise when some way of making ‘catches on’. A way of doing things might catch on for any number of reasons, “including their ties to the human perceptual apparatus, complementarity of function and ease of processing fluency, piggy-backing on evolutionarily-selected capacities and traits, reinforcement of or by existing practices and institutions, or for purely arbitrary factors (in which case the resulting categorization is effectively random).” (c) Once established, an art-kind becomes part of an artworld, itself a historically contingent social organization that includes other art-kinds, institutions, and a set of interlocking roles (e.g. ‘artist’, ‘curator’, ‘critic’, ‘gallerist’, and so forth). So considered synchronically, an established art-kind is a kind of social fact that includes a range of practices and exemplars, ignorance of or incompetence within disqualifies one from appreciation of the kind and its works. But considered diachronically, in terms of an art-kind’s emergence and institutionalization, all one sees is contingency; there are other kinds, equally well or poorly rooted in general aspects of human beings, other ways of organizing these kinds hierarchically, and other uses to which these kinds can be put. My point here is just that Xhignesse’s claim that, considered diachronically, art-kinds are sheerly contingent is diametrically opposed to Crowther’s insistence that art-kinds such as sculpture arise solely out of aspects of human embodiment together with certain human needs (here unmentioned) arising from human self-consciousness, yet it is hard to see how either has introduced conceptual resources and arguments that might convince the other to change his mind.
The issues that arise from my two comments extend, so it seems to me, far beyond the discussion of contemporary sculpture, and certainly nothing in the comments provides convincing reasons to think that Crowther cannot make sense of such sculptures’ novel appearances and meanings. But the comments do I think intensify the question of whether Crowther’s account, or indeed any like it that claims to read off the character of an art form from general aspects of human embodiment and self-consciousness, can illuminate sculpture generally or contemporary sculpture in particular. My next blog post will consider in detail Crowther’s application of his account to the sculptures of Michelangelo and Jeff Koons, and then further test his account against the work of Penone.
References:
Paul Crowther, Theory of the Art Object (2020)
Johann Gottfried Herder, Critical Forests (‘First and Fourth Grove’) (1769)
-----Sculpture (1778)
Robert Hopkins, ‘Sculpture and Space’ in Imagination, Philosophy and the Arts (2003), ed. Matthew Kieran and Dominic Lopes
-----‘Sculpture’ in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (2003) ed. Jerrold Levinson
William James, Psychology (1892)
Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form (1953)
Gotthold Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Poetry and Painting (1766)
Herbert Read, The Art of Sculpture (1956)
Michel-Antoine Xhignesse, ‘What makes a Kind an Art-kind?’, British Journal of Aesthetics (2020)