In a recent series of blog posts I explored what sense we might give to the claim that in some obscure way Muqi’s 14th century painting ‘Six Persimmons’ was about ineffability. This motivated consideration of whether artistic meaning generally is ineffable, that is, cannot be put in words; and in turn raised question of whether and in what ways or senses there are kinds of meaning that are distinctively artistic. Each of these questions is of considerable difficulty, and seem to raise, if not beg, further questions: Do all works of art, including abstract paintings, absolute music, and decorative artworks, have meanings? Is possessing artistic meaning partly criterial of something being a work of art, or is there a conceptual divorce between something being a work of art and it having meanings of a certain kind or in a certain manner? And if we offer an answer to any of these questions, should we think that the answer is a kind of explication and articulation of what people implicitly recognize in responding in an appropriate manner to an artwork, or are the answers partly stipulative and/or reconstructions of what are in practice sets of messy, fuzzy, and/or incoherent responses to works? In the following series of three blog posts I’ll try to bring a very partial clarity to some of these issues by considering a few questions: 1. Can any sense be given to the idea that some artworks are the simplest works, that is, works that exhibit only the most minimal set of features, and with those features presented without elaboration? Such works, if there are any, would merit particular attention in thinking about distinctive features of art and artworks. 2. Can we make sense of the idea that there are elements of, or elemental forms of, artistic meaning? And at what level of abstraction should we look for such elements? If we consider poetry, would the elements be at the level of sounds, of words, or of basic patterns and rhythms? If we consider painting, would the elements be lines and deposits of paint, or of Gestalt-type figures possessing inherently dynamic qualities, or again would the elements be conceptual features such as representation and expression? 3. One persistent intuition about artistic meaning is that it is language-like, and yet across a range of conceptions and aspects of language there seems to be no sustainable analogies with artistic meaning. What ideas is the analogy between art and language, or between artistic meaning and linguistic meaning, aiming to articulate? And can these ideas be articulated independently of the seemingly intractable problems in the art-language analogy? Here I turn to the first question: are there simplest artworks?
A first thought would be that the simplest artworks are those that seem unelaborated. Simplicity in this sense does not attach to the content, but rather to the (appearance) of efforts of elaboration of the content and its presentation. Poems such as Wallace Stevens’s ‘The river is moving/The blackbird must be flying’ come to mind. In a lecture given in 1965 the philosopher Richard Wollheim coined the term ‘minimal art’ for works where it seemed as if the artist had done less than what one seems to look for or expect in an artwork. Wollheim’s examples were works of visual art including Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and Ad Reinhardt’s all-black paintings. One aspect of such visual works is that they are inconceivable without a presupposed rich background of artworks, against which they stand out as provocations: why do we need all that messy paint, all that appeal to the sensuous eye, all that furious gestural expression?
As my concern is initially to elicit and reflect upon intuitions of simplicity with regard to artistic meaning, I set aside the sophisticated works of Duchamp and Reinhardt, and turn to the artistic red squares proposed by Arthur Danto as a thought-experiment, then to three instances from world art: the so-called Blombos pebble of perhaps 80,000 years ago, drawings in the dirt by Australian Aboriginal group the Walbiri, and carved house posts of the renowned carvers of the Amiramy people of Madagascar. But before proceeding to the putative instances of ‘simple’ art, I’ll briefly consider an argument from the musicologist Leonard B. Meyer that foregrounds the difficult issues in isolating relatively simple kinds or instances of artistic meaning. In an article from 1967, ‘Some Remarks on Value and Greatness in Music, Meyer addresses the question ‘What makes music great?’ His proposal attempts to illuminate, though not answer, the question in a two-fold manner: he investigates how value is ascribed in non- or extra-musical areas, and he attempts to transfer the findings to music; and he emphasizes music as a kind of communication that can be understood in light of so-called information theory. He begins by dismissing the idea that evaluation is limited to comparison of instances within genres and sub-genres of music, with the corollary that evaluation across genres is illegitimate; he asserts that saying Bach’s B Minor Mass and ‘Twinkle, twinkle’ are ‘equally’ good or good ‘each in its own way’ is “preposterous and false.” He immediately adds that “length, size, or complexity as such” are not criteria of value, though “complexity does have something to do with excellence.” (Meyer 1967, p. 24) To bring out the connection between complexity and excellence, he asks ‘What is the fundamental difference between sophisticated art music and primitive music?’ Relative to sophisticated music, primitive music is “employs a smaller repertory of tones”, “the distance of these notes from the tonic is smaller”, and “there is a great deal of repetition, though often slightly varied repetition”. Keeping in mind that ‘primitive’ music is not generally a feature of small-scale or ‘primitive’ societies, but rather is characterized relative to the fuller realization of musical possibilities in sophisticated music (tin-pan alley is primitive in relation to jazz), Meyer takes the connection to value to be the following: primitive music seeks ‘almost immediate gratification’ and is intolerant of uncertainty. But, following information theory, Meyer thinks that information increases with deviation from patterns or expected outcomes. His linguistic examples are that the sentence ‘She is as tall as Bill’ is more expected, and correlatively less informative, than the sentence ‘She is as tall as blue lilacs are’, and that ‘She is as tall as Bill is’ is less informative than ‘She is as tall as Bill is wide’. (p. 31) Meyer then asserts that in communicative situations information is ceteris paribus valuable, and so the greater value of sophisticated music is that, in comparison with primitive music, it uses and exploits uncertainty and deviation from norms and patterns. He of course recognizes that not all complexity is valuable (p. 36), if for no other reason than that some kinds of complexity are fundamentally unenjoyable. What, then, do we enjoy in music? There are three aspects of musical enjoyment: “the sensuous, the associative-characterizing, and the syntactical” (p. 36), and it is syntactical organization that is the basis of ascriptions of value.
For our purposes it is particular interest how Meyer attempts to deal with the objection that, all the same, some relatively simple works, such as Schubert’s song ‘Das Wandern’ are especially valuable because of their simplicity, which gives them a charm unattainable by relatively complex works. In a later essay Meyer qualifies this explanation which “now seems to me, if not entirely mistaken, at least somewhat confused.” Then in a suggestion that remarkably echoes Karl Marx’s notorious suggestion that we can still enjoy works of the Ancient Greeks because we associate them with the childhood of humanity, Meyer writes that “it seems probable that the charm of simplicity as such is associative rather than syntactical, that is, its appeal is to childhood, remembered as untroubled and secure.” (p. 37) Rather, for the purpose of evaluation one must distinguish materials and relations among materials, and “[w]hat is crucial is relational richness, and such richness (or complexity) is in no way incompatible with simplicity of musical vocabulary and grammar.” (Meyer 2000, pp. 56-7) Meyer goes on to analyze at great length the density of musical relations in a seemingly simple piece, the Trio from the third movement of Mozart’s G-Minor Symphony (K.550) I take it that Meyer thinks the earlier account was not entirely mistaken because he continues to maintain a tight connection between musical value and complexity, but that it was confused in not distinguishing kinds of complexity, and especially in not recognizing that (only?) relational complexity is relevant to the evaluation of music.
It seems to me that this latter account is superior to the earlier in relieving the explanation of the appeal to childhood, and particularly in recognizing that evaluations of simplicity and complexity attach to multiple aspects of an artwork. But questions immediately arise: Does the distinction between materials and relations exhaust all the aspects of an artwork relevant to its evaluation? Why would an artist choose relatively simple materials, and couldn’t that choice be part of what is valuable in a work (one thinks of Bertolt Brecht at his desk with a picture of a donkey captioned ‘Even I Must Understand’)? If Meyer were to respond that choice of relatively simple materials might be valuable for non-musical reasons (such as ready intelligibility to large numbers of people), how does one draw a line between the musical and the non-musical?
I put these questions on hold until latter posts, and now introduce a small number of artworks the evaluation of which raises the issues of simplicity and complexity, what aspects are relatively simple or complex, and whether and how one can with regard to artworks draw the line between artistic and non-artistic meaningfulness. A major part of my reason for choosing these examples is that they seem to me to be among a small number of works of global art that pose particularly difficult problems a study in the philosophy of visual art that I’m working on:
Example #1: Indiscernible Red Squares
The example of course comes from the opening chapter of Arthur Danto’s The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. In the manner beloved of analytic philosophers, Danto sets up a thought experiment: Imagine a number of square, red monochrome canvases. They are ‘indiscernible’ in the sense that there is nothing about them that visually differentiates one from the other; they are the same size, same shape, same weave of canvas, same color, same saturation, etc. What differentiates them is their histories. One is a work of abstract art, another a kind of conceptual piece aiming to show a work about nothing, another a Romantic work entitled ‘Kierkegaard’s Mood’ that depicts the Red Sea after it has swallowed the Egyptians pursuing the fleeing Jews, yet another is merely a store sample, etc. Danto urges that merely posing and reflecting upon the example induces one to think that nothing (visually) discernible differentiates the artworks from the mere artifacts (such as the sample), and nothing (visually) discernible differentiates the very different meanings of the different artworks (the abstract painting, the conceptual piece, the Romantic work). I suggest that a philosophy of visual art ought either to make sense of the differentiations among the works, or explain why the thought experiment fails in some sense.
Example #2, The Blombos Pebble:
Starting in the 1990s the archeologist Christopher Henshilwood excavated a cave in South Africa. He uncovered a number of artifacts made by early humans, including one dated to approximately 80,000 years ago that might plausibly be considered the earliest known work of art. The work is a small, roughly rectangular piece of ochre. Two sides are abraded, as if rubbed. One side bears incisions of a rectangle that echoes the shape of piece of ochre, and within the inscribed rectangle are evenly spaced, diagonal crossing lines. The incisions form a design, that is, a perceptually graspable form with at least three differentiated elements (outline, field, and patterned internal marks). Whatever the uses to which the piece of ochre was put (A crayon? Sunscreen? Insect repellent?), the meaning and purpose of the design (if any) must be conceptually distinct from the use(s) of the piece of ochre. I suggest that a philosophy of visual art should offer some illumination on the question of whether the Blombos Pebble is an artwork, and, if so, what range of distinctively artistic meanings is might bear; or, if not, why not, or why the question of its artistic status and meaningfulness is of little importance in understanding the world’s visual art.
Example #3, Walbiri Graphism:
In the mid-late 1950s the anthropologist Nancy Munn did field work among the Walbiri people of central Australia. She came to focus upon the ‘graphic representations’ of these people, which were of three types: drawings made in the sand primarily by women as illustrations and visual props in story telling; drawings primarily by men on paper supplied by Munn that illustrated distinctively Walbiri iconography relating to their myths and cosmology; totemic designs painted by both men and women on boards, stones, and their own bodies. In the opening paragraph of the book she refers to these graphic representations generally as ‘art’ (Munn, p. xiii) , but thereafter the term drops out, and the concept of art plays no overt role whatsoever in the remainder of the book. As analyzed by Munn, Walbiri graphism has three key elements: 1. The designs are guruwari, which refers simultaneously to ancestors and “the power of generation, which is an essentially abstract or invisible potency left by the ancestors in the soil as they traveled through the country” (p. 29); these two conceptually distinct kinds of elements that are invariably fused in the design. Along with the use of guruwari in story telling, they accompany songs in rituals, where the signs lack the otherwise customary precise reference to a location, but rather combine with the song to infuse the ceremonial event with ancestral meanings. (p. 148) So the visual designs are not so to speak stand-alone elements, but are characteristically combined with language or song; Munn stresses throughout the point that Walbiri representations in use are multi-modal. 2. All (uses of) designs are wiri, that is, strong, powerful, and important. (p. 33) The power of the designs is context-specific, and is typical effect is, as noted above, to saturate the context of their use with ancestral meanings, in particular those of generativity and fertility. (p. 55) 3. At their most basic level, the Walbiri designs “are “the “visual sedimentations” of a movement connecting individual consciousness or bodily being and the outer, social world” (p. 217), and “are “multivocal” condensation symbols that can project an image of dynamic societal unity in microcosm.” (p. 220) These characterizations are of a piece with the representations’ multi-modality, their general importance, and their evocation of the existential significance of the ancestors.
I suggest that a philosophy of visual art offer some illumination as to whether and in what sense Walbiri graphic representations are a kind of visual art, and, if so, help explicate how and why their meanings are always specified linguistically in their context-specific uses.
Examples #4, Amiramy Post Carvings:
In the 1960s the anthropologist Maurice Bloch did fieldwork among the Zafimaniry people of eastern Madagascar, a group renowned for their woodworking. In one of his essays on this people, he notes that for much of the twentieth-century the Zafimaniry were asked by anthropologists, including Bloch himself, what their carved designs meant. Or, rather, they were asked in French and in the indigenous language Malagasy a cluster of related questions: What do the designs vouloir dire (literally in English, ‘want to say’)? What is the point of this? What are they pictures of? What is the root cause of this? Bloch writes that when he asked ‘What are those pictures of?’, he “triggered the ready-made phrase that there was no point, and when I asked what people were doing I was told ‘Carving’.” (Bloch, p. 41) Other writers have claimed that they were told that “various parts of the carvings are representation; that, for example, the ubiquitous circular designs represent the moon and that some of the designs, which appear like shading, are rain.” (ibid.) Bloch’s subsequent fieldwork that these identifications of content were in fact just names that indicate a trivial visual similarity, like the name ‘herringbone tweed’ for a abstract pattern of cloth that contains no reference to the skeleton of a small fish.
Bloch comes to think that the question ‘What do the designs mean?’ is the wrong place to start in trying to understand them. Rather, one needs to start from the fact that the designs are typically decorations of houses, and ask about the significance of the houses. For the Zafimaniry houses are “the basis of ordered society and the mark of a successful life”. (p. 42) The key feature of the house is that it is built at the beginning of a marriage, the young man puts up “central house-posts and a flimsy outer wall of reed and mats, [and] the young woman will bring the furniture of the hearth.” A marriage is as it were ‘flimsy’ at its outset, but if successful the marriage, as well as the house, will ‘harden’. Reeds are gradually replace by wood, which is called the house acquiring bones. The hardest available heartwood is used, and it is this wood that is carved. Carving is conceptualized as a continuation of the hardening process of wood, and is said to ‘honor’ the wood. Bloch concludes that the carvings are not referring or signifying, not ‘pointing outwards’ or ‘trying to say something’, but rather are “a celebration of the material and the building and of a successful life which continues to expand and reproduce”. (p. 44)
I suggest that a philosophy of visual art should treat Zafimaniry carvings as central instances, and make conceptual room for the idea that across a range of cases works of visual art ‘mean’ nothing in the sense that the question points in the wrong direction (that is, towards representation, reference, and signification), but rather that the meanings that arise in visual artworks should be understood as elaborations of materials in the service of their embodying and making vivid central social, cultural, and even cosmic meanings of their makers and their primary audiences. Now, with the questions in mind about simplicity and complexity in artistic meaning from the first half of this post, and the examples from the second half, I turn in the next post to a consideration of what seems to me prima facie to be the prominent account of art most responsive to these points, that of the great anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. A point of further interest is that Lévi-Strauss offers a way of trying to make sense of why the thought that artistic meaning in visual art has a language-like quality.
Maurice Bloch, ‘Questions not to ask of Malagasy carvings’, in Essays on Cultural Transmission (2005)
Arthur Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981)
Karl Marx, Grundrisse (1857-58)
Leonard B. Meyer, ‘Some Remarks on Value and Greatness in Music’, in Music, The Arts, and Ideas (1967)
-----‘Grammatical Simplicity and Relational Richness: The Trio of Mozart’s G-Minor Symphony’, in The Spheres of Music (2000)
Nancy Munn, Walbiri Iconography: Graphic Representation and Cultural Symbolism in a Central Australian Society (1973)
John Rapko, ‘How Might We Understand the Ineffability of Muqi’s Four Persimmons?’, in academia.edu at https://www.academia.edu/112887614/How_Might_We_Understand_the_Ineffability_of_Mu_Qis_Four_Persimmons
Richard Wollheim, “Minimal Art”, in On Art and the Mind (1973)