The following is the first in a series of 40-50 posts that collectively will comprise the first draft of a book on the philosophy of the visual arts. I imagine the book will go through at least three drafts, but I’ll post the first draft in 1000-or-so word segments in hopes that some people will find it interesting enough to read and along and, hopefully, comment and especially criticize.
1. A great deal of philosophical thinking about the arts might well be thought of as offering answers to the question ‘What is art?’. The question is typically further focused and narrowed in one of three ways. One prominent way is to focus on a particular artform. So a philosophy of painting asks ‘What is painting (when practiced as an art)?’, a philosophy of theater wonders ‘What is theater (practiced as an artform?’. A second kind investigates the artistic process, the actions that an artist engages in in making an artwork. A third gives the initial question an ontological flavor, and asks ‘What is a work of art?’. The last focuses on the recipient of the art, and tries to uncover and analyze distinctive attitudes or kinds of response that an appropriately attentive person exhibits in encountering an artwork; this is the world of the ‘aesthetic attitude’ or of ‘aesthetic experience’, with the further assumption that it is a distinctive feature of artwork to solicit and reward these kinds of attitudes and experiences. Each of these four further investigations must presuppose some sort of answer to the initial question of what art is; otherwise there would be no distinctive topic to investigate, that is, no way to distinguish artistic from non-artistic ways of making and perceiving.
But for many reflective thinkers, the appeal to the concept of art is an appeal to nothing at all. One broad and prominent line of thinking is that the very concept of art, and its use in intellectual contexts, is so ideologically tainted by its origin in thinking about visual artworks in Western contexts of galleries and museums that it is worse than useless in thinking about global arts, as the concept inevitably carries with it conceptions and criteria for applying the concept that demote the vast array of global, non-gallery arts from serious consideration. Typically, this charge is not followed by the attempt to offer a reformed, ideologically untainted conception of art, but rather with the quick and unargued implication that there is no viable concept of art generally. A different line of thinking urges that there is a viable concept of art, but its scope of legitimate application is restricted to modern gallery-museum arts. So on the first line, the whole attempt to metamorphose the question ‘What is art?’ into the questions ‘What is the artform of X?’ [where X is painting or drawing or sculpture or music or theater . . . ] can’t get going, as there is no way of picking out an artform from human practices generally; while on the second line artforms, like art itself, is restricted to works destined for the refined worlds of galleries and museums.
In this book I present a course of philosophical thinking that has few if any models or predecessors: the nature of artistic meaning, in particular in the visual arts. What is artistic meaning? One might well think that the investigation of artistic meaning inherits all the problems of determining what makes an artform a form of art, while adding the further, notorious obscurity of the concept of meaning. As John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley put it, ‘meaning’ is “[a] word so confused that it is best never used at all. More direct expressions can always be found”. (Dewey and Bentley, p. 297) In a great deal of English language philosophy since World War II, invocations of ‘meaning’ accordingly are treated as something that can be replaced with more manageable and precise conceptions. The taming of the intractable concept of meaning into something admitting of philosophical analysis involves three steps: First, ‘meaning’ is restricted to language. Then language is conceived as consisting of sentences that can be analyzed one at a time. Finally, such sentences admit of truth-or-falsity, and whatever was meant by ‘meaning’ would be captured in considering the circumstances of and ways in which sentences can be true or false. As W. V. O. Quine put it: “You have given all the meanings when you have given the truth-conditions of all the sentences.” (Quoted in Platts, p. 53) Supposedly the analysis of truth-conditions thereby clarifies and replaces the muddle of meaning.
I go a different way. To my mind this short route to the elimination of talk about meaning does nothing to preserve or clarify the intuitions that motivated reference to meaning in art. Among such intuitions, generalized and formulated as claims about distinctive features of human life, I include at least the following: the sense that across almost all cultures the arts are central and important (the Centrality claim); the sense that whatever needs the arts address, whatever functions they fulfill, whatever desires they satisfy, etc, cannot in many instances be addressed and fulfilled and satisfied through other human practices, such as those in the realms of economics, religion, or politics (the Irreplaceability claim); and that the Centrality and Irreplaceability of the arts can be explained in part by their possession of certain kinds of meaning that are available to suitably attuned percipients of art works. ‘Meaning’ in the relevant senses is a heterogenous group that includes various kinds of representation, expression, symbolicity, metaphoricity, solicitations to participation and/or involvement, and resonances. There is no determinate limit to what can or cannot be a kind of artistic meaning; the sole determinant for inclusion is whether in fact something contributes to the distinctive kinds of meaningfulness exhibited by artworks. A striking feature of artistic meaning is its ineffability: it cannot be exhaustively put into words or captured in a finite string of sentences.
This philosophical exploration of artistic meaning will have three major parts: first I’ll sketch a philosophical anthropology that aims to show very basic features of human life that are presupposed by the very existence of the arts, but even more so which are reservoirs of basic kinds of meaningfulness that artworks draw from and recruit. The first of these features is embodiment, that is, having a body that exhibits front-and-back, up-and-down, bilateral symmetry, and handedness. Then in order I’ll consider gesture, the human hand, and language. Although I envision this book as part of a general philosophy of the arts, my focus here will be on the visual arts, so I’ll further give a summary account of human vision. The second part will consider very basic aspects of the making of artistic meaning, in particular its ineliminable historicity, and how meaning arises from constraints, including the nature of an artistic medium and conventions of genre and style. The third part will try to show and analyze the further factors involved in bringing together the previously canvased kinds and mechanisms of meaningfulness in order to produce the rich, non-finite kinds of meaning characteristic of visual artworks.
Next, I’ll introduce and give brief accounts of three works of art that will serve to orient the discussions in the book. I choose these three, from among tens of thousands of possibilities, because they are among my personal favorites, because they all have attracted bodies of high-level writing and reflection, and because collectively they give a sense of the range of the visual arts. The three are the sand drawings of the Australian Aboriginal group the Warlbiri, a mask from the Pacific Northwest group the Kwakwaka’wakw (formerly referred to as the Kwakiutl), and a drawing by Rembrandt.
References:
John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley, Knowing and the Known (1949)
Mark Platts, Ways of Meaning (1979)