I turn now to the great and so to speak most proximal resource for artistic meaningfulness, which I’ll call ‘artifactuality’, the sense that an artwork is something made by human beings. As introduced in my previous post, the basic feature of artistic meaningfulness, the ‘twice over’ characteristic described by Michael Podro and Patrick Maynard, can arise only upon the basis of the recognition of the made quality of an artwork, on something like the following conceptual sequence: (i) the viewer recognizes something in the work, that is, (part of) the work’s subject or content; (ii) the viewer senses expressiveness in the made quality of the manner in which the subject is presented; and (iii) the viewer projects relations (similarities, analogies, contrasts, etc.) between subject and manner of presentation. As important as the ‘twice over’ is, the resources of artifactuality are much broader, and indeed help build and enrich every aspect of artistic meaningfulness. Or so I shall argue. In this post I’ll give an introduction to the resource of artworks’ artifactuality, and so prepare for the coming great confrontation between the Aristotelean hylomorphic conception of artifacts and the alternative conception, most notably introduced and developed by the philosopher Gilbert Simondon and the anthropologist Tim Ingold, that I’ll adopt.
About one hundred years ago in his Lectures on Fine Art, the philosopher Hegel set out what he called the three common ideas of art: “(i) The work of art is no natural product; it is brought about by human activity; (ii) it is essentially made for man’s apprehension, and in particular is drawn more or less from the sensuous field for apprehension by the senses; (iii) it has an end and aim in itself.” (Hegel, p. 25) Hegel takes up these three ideas and gives them what must be called a maximalist interpretation in light of his systematic philosophy. Here I only note that the first point is a statement of the artifactuality of artworks, which he quickly re-conceptualizes as the claim that works of art are ‘higher’ than nature or natural products, in that they are products of the ‘spirit’, that is, (very roughly put) the historical and conceptual structure of recognitions, takings (that is, taking something to be something), practices, institutions, and interpretations that make up human culture. The effect of this is alleged to be that “Human interest, the spiritual value possessed by an event, an individual character, an action in its complexity and outcomes, is grasped in the work of art and blazoned more purely and more transparently than is possible on the ground of other non-artistic things.” (p. 29) A less maximalist, though still substantive, way of explicating the first point makes two claims: artworks qua artifacts are intention-dependent, that is, they are made for something, or with the aim of accomplishing something; and that artworks qua artifacts are historical, in the senses that (a) they are always items within a temporally extended tradition of making, (b) the recognition of which is part of their meaning (aim, purpose, import, etc.) (These two claims will be discussed in the next post via consideration of recent philosophical essays by Paul Bloom, Jerrold Levinson, and Amie Thomasson (see references below)). In general I shall follow Hegel in building the conception of artistic meaning, with his three common ideas rephrased as the three resources of artifactuality, perceptibility, and autonomy.
As an alternative route into the nature of artifactuality, one that additionally foreshadows something of the alternate Simondon-Ingold conception of artifacts for which I’ll argue, consider Wallace Stevens’s crowd-pleaser, ‘Anecdote of the Jar’:
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
The poem presents a stark, though not absolute, contrast between the jar, a prototypical artifact, and the ‘wilderness’, seemingly a prototypical conception of what is not- or other-than-human, and so a version of the great dichotomy nature/culture. Nothing encourages the thought that the speaking voice is also the maker of the jar, and the reader more likely assumes that the origin of the jar is a matter of indifference; what matters rather is that it is an unadorned (“gray and bare”) artifact in the shape of a cylinder (“round” and “tall”; “of a port” suggests both that it is open, and, in an idiomatic sense of ‘of a port’, of some importance and/or striking bearing). While the action of making is backgrounded, the opening spondee of “I placed” signals the fundamental action that frames and induces the significance of all that follows in the poem: the jar is placed on a hill. The central mark of the jar’s artifactuality is its roundness (roundness, alone with squareness, will play a major roles later in the book as fundamental to the ways that artworks establish a conception of the larger world outside the work). The poem goes on to emphasize the way that the placing of the jar organizes that which is outside of the jar: Prior to the placement that which is already there is at most a ‘slovenly wilderness’, and the speaker’s action of placing the jar induces the highlighted actions and re-conceptualizations wherewith the wilderness surrounds the hill, rises up, and even loses its character as ‘wilderness’, something wholly other-than-human. As the agent and prop of such massive re-organization, the jar and its placing are said, surely with an echo of Genesis, to take dominion everywhere. Whereas Tennessee ‘gives of’ bird and bush, paradigmatically natural beings, the jar, as culture set against nature, is alien to the items of Tennessee.—So runs a standard interpretation.
But there is more, it seems to me, and something which helps make sense of the peculiar ambivalence of the poem, an ambivalence which has seemed to induce a range of interpretations claiming for the poem the full range of attitudes from celebrating the human conquest of nature to Romantically lamenting the human destruction of nature. The philosopher of art Richard Wollheim once remarked to me that works of art have a way of teaching you how to understand them. If one reads the poem aloud a few hundred times, one perhaps begins to notice that the poem seems to embody or exemplify the very conceptions it states. One notices peculiar patches of order—the oddly introduced and oddly abandoned rhyming of ‘air/bare/everywhere’ that cuts across the break between the second and third stanzas; the rhyming of ‘round/ground’, something that connects words that seem otherwise to signal items from either side of the culture/nature dichotomy—along with determined disorganizing effects—the seemingly clumsy and run-on feel of ‘Surround that hill’; the catachresis of a wilderness that is no longer wild; the peculiar resistance to meaning of the word ‘give’. Nor does the very framing of a dichotomy quite make sense, for the wilderness is not a thing wholly other, for, if nothing else, it admits of some conceptualization as part of a delimited spatial and political entity, Tennessee. This latter point, that the dichotomy culture/nature cannot be sustained in general, and in particular in conceptualizing artifacts, will become central in the conception adopted here. And the former point, that there are major aspects of artistic meaningfulness that are bound up with the ways in which they may become intelligible, in particular through the self-exemplifying character of meaning in art, will be developed in later sections of the book.
In my next post I turn to the contribution of recent analytic philosophy in understanding the central characteristics of the resource of artifactuality, the intention-dependent and historical character of artifacts.
References:
Paul Bloom, ‘Intention, history, and artifact concepts’, in Cognition (1996)
G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art
Tim Ingold, ‘On Weaving a Basket’, in The Perception of the Environment (2000)
Jerrold Levinson, ‘Artworks as Artifacts’, in Creations of the Mind, Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence (eds) (2007)
Patrick Maynard, Drawing Distinctions (2005)
Michael Podro, Depiction (1998)
Wallace Stevens, ‘Anecdote of the Jar’ (1919), in Harmonium (1923)
Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (2017)
-- Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (2020)
Amie Thomasson, ‘Artifacts and Human Concepts’, in Creations of the Mind , Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence (eds) (2007)