One problem that afflicts the philosophical consideration of art has been philosophers’ consideration of a narrow range and very few actual artworks. From among the greatest modern philosophers, Immanuel Kant’s consideration of particular artworks is contained mostly in some remarks on a poem by Frederick the Great, Martin Heidegger spun out his account of art largely from reflection upon the example of ‘the’ Greek temple, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty considered at length only stylistic features of Cézanne. Relatedly, most philosophers restrict themselves to one or two kinds of art: for the unmusical Kant it was poetry and emblems, for the unmusical Heidegger poetry and painting, for Merleau-Ponty painting and literature. No great classic philosopher has given any extended consideration to, say, dance. Here we restrict ourselves in advance to the visual arts, but then what range of artworks should a philosophical consideration of distinctively artistic meaning of visual arts consider?
Here I’ll introduce and sketch the artistic meanings of a small number of visual artworks. From among thousands of possibilities I’ve semi-arbitrarily chosen a few from a range of cultures and of various types. One criterion guiding the choices is that in each case there is extended and insightful published interpretation of the piece; I’ll summarize the interpretations and treat them as part of the evidence that a philosophical account of artistic meaning must attempt to make sense of. I see no way of initially responding to the objection that the procedure begs the questions of what a work of art is and whether these pieces are artworks. One sign of the relative success of this investigation would be that by the end of the book the objection will have melted away in the face of the evidence of the works’ artistic richness.
1. The Zafimaniry are a group of Malagasy-speaking slash-and-burn farmers in the eastern forests of Madagascar. Like the Haida of the Pacific Northwest, they are renowned as carvers. Part of their traditional carving, according to the anthropologist Maurice Bloch, is making “low reliefs or engravings of relatively elaborate geometrical patterns which cover the wooden parts of their houses—especially the shutters and, most beautifully, the three main posts.” (Bloch, p. 39)
Bloch writes that people who have written about these works have in some cases asked various Zafimaniry what they meant, and already problems arise. The question is posed in French, where the phrase usually translated into English as ‘meant’ is vouloir dire (literally, ‘try [or want] to say’). Nothing readily translates ‘want to say’ into Malagasy, so the Malagasy-speaking Bloch suggests they must have understood the question as something that translates readily into one of four senses: ‘What is the point of it?’, ‘What is the root cause of it?’, ‘What is it [a depiction] of?’ or ‘What are you doing [in making this]?’ Bloch received “rather disappointing answers” when he asked these questions: there was no point to these carved depictions of nothing. Parts, but only parts, of the carvings were said to represent something, such as a circle representing the moon. But he did receive one seemingly substantive answer carving the wood “made it beautiful [and so] ‘honor[s] the wood’. (ibid, pp. 41-2) Bloch comes to realize that the significance of the carvings is not as it were given in themselves, either taken one at a time or as a whole, but rather only in the context of the houses and the Zafimaniry understanding of the role of houses in the trajectory of a life construed as an endless passage from relative undetermination to relative determination, a passage metaphorically conceptualized and made manifest in the hardening of a house’s wood. When first built, a house has central posts and a flimsy outer wall of reeds and mats. Over time the flimsy materials are replaced with massive pieces of wood. “The house is the marriage”, and when the original occupants die their descendants will inhabit it and continue the process. The hardening of the wood is endless, because even very hard wood is carved. Thereby carving gains a conceptualization: it is “a continuation of the process of hardening and transformation” that “’honours’ the hardness of the heartwood and makes it even more evident and beautiful.” (ibid, p. 43)
Surely there is a great deal more to be said about Zafimaniry carvings. One would certainly wish to know how the Zafimaniry evaluate particular instances, and whether particular instances at least in some cases carry further kinds of meaningfulness beyond their decorative role in metaphorizing the hardening process. And what of the significance, if any, or the shallowness of house carvings as contrasted with the relative depth of other kinds of carving? Still, Bloch’s account provides the material for some initial remarks on artistic meaning. Like these house carvings, much of the world’s visual art is decorative, where ‘decorative’ indicates that artistic work is a (conceptually) secondary elaboration of some primary material, subject, or content; decoration is always ‘decoration-of-X’. (I’ll consider decoration at length later in this book.) There is no representational content; or, if there is (as in my next example), it is unretrievable by mere visual inspection, and is rather assigned by traditional usage (here the circle is a moon; in early Chinese art it is Heaven) or by the artist. Some salience and visual attractiveness is given through the combination of the skill in making and the forms, textures, and patternings within the work, all of which are perceptually evident and bear kinds of significance as expressive of human actions (scraping, cutting, digging, filing, smoothing, etc.).
We can think of the Zafimaniry carvings as exhibiting a kind of ‘zero degree’ of artistic meaningfulness: they lack a subject or content, and offer, in themselves and taken individually, only (!) a display of skill and design. But already, even at the ‘zero degree’, they bear and continue a history of making, a style, and existentially serious conceptualizations of themselves and of that which they decorate, all of which are perceptually available to a suitably attuned perceiver.—In my next 1000+-word post I’ll present another instance of this zero degree, the sand paintings and totemic images of the Australian Aboriginal group the Walbiri (or Warlpiri), and then consider a further degree of artistic meaningfulness in a particular kind of mask of the Pacific Northwest group the Kwakwaka’wakw (or Kwakiutl).
References:
Maurice Bloch, “Questions not to ask of Malagasy carvings” in Essays on Cultural Transmission (2005)