Now as a brief introduction to consideration of the world’s major forms of visual art, that is, ‘artforms’ (which I take to be bodily decoration and tattooing, textiles, pottery, masks, drawing, painting, and sculpture), I’ll first briefly consider the concept of an artform; and then introduce the notion of an original or basic action for the artform which, following Richard Wollheim’s coinage, I’ll call ‘ur-artform’, as in ‘ur-tattooing’, ‘ur-pottery, ‘ur-painting’, etc. As with every discussion in this book, my concern is to consider the concept and conceptions in light of their contribution to artistic meaningfulness, and so here as elsewhere the discussion is highly selective.
In the past half millennium or so there have been a number of prominent cultural episodes in which the concept of an artform is foregrounded; one thinks of the debate between Leonardo and Michelangelo on the relative value and status of painting and sculpture, of Lessing on poetry and painting, and the drawn-out and inconclusive discussion of the question whether photography is or can be an artform. Hegel’s consideration in the 1820s of the artforms as differing manners of giving sensuous embodiment to the Absolute (very roughly, whatever counts as fully serious for any socio-historical period) towers among philosophical considerations, while in the twentieth-century the question of the nature and individualization of artforms is very little discussed in comparison to the prominent question of ‘What is art?’. In the first half of the century the monumental works of Benedetto Croce and R. G. Collingwood scarcely discuss the individual arts, and what little discussion there is of middle-range concepts (that is, between the general concept of art and individual artworks) is largely confined to considerations of the modes of the tragic, the epic, and lyric, and the distinction between temporal and spatial arts. In the post-World War II period Thomas Munro gives a central and typical statement, artforms are defined and characterized in accordance with three criterial characteristics: distinctive kinds of processes of making, particular kinds and uses of a medium, and distinctive kinds of products (Munro, p. 433). He offers as an example of this conception of an artform with regard to sculpture: as an artform sculpture involves distinctive processes: carving, cutting, or hewing; distinctive media: wood, stone, metal; and distinctive products: statues, ornaments, etc. or figures. More strictly and abstractly defined, sculpture “is the art of planning and constructing three-dimensional forms, usually to be seen from the outside, having one or all of the following characteristics: (a) representing natural or imagined objects; (b) presenting a design of three-dimensional shapes; (c) suggesting general ideas, feelings, or other types of experience” (p. 455)
To my knowledge the most sophisticated philosophical consideration of the concept of an artform, and one consistent with Munro’s conception, comes from the Dominic McIver Lopes in his book Beyond Art. McIver’s most general concerns there are, first and primarily, to elaborate and defend what he calls a ‘buck passing’ theory of the arts, wherein the concept of art in general plays little role, and whatever seemed of philosophical interest in the general concept is rather given in examining the different kinds of arts (painting, sculpture, etc.); and second and derivatively, to consider whether ‘hard cases’, i.e. novel instances of art in the twentieth-century, such as the readymades of Marcel Duchamp, are best thought of as sui generis and existing outside of any artform, or rather whether there are rightly thought of as the products of extended and/or mixed use of traditional media, and so also of artforms. As I intend to consider Lopes’s account at length in a subsequent book on the philosophy of contemporary art, here I restrict myself to a summary with comments on his conception of an artform. Lopes begins by distinguishing a theory of art from a theory of the arts, where the former considers generally what makes an artifact a work of art, and the latter what makes a certain activity (e.g. painting) an art; as he puts it, “A theory of the arts articulates what makes painting and dance arts and displays why philosophy and skateboarding are not arts” (Lopes, p. 14) Lopes does not use the term ‘artform’, but rather considers what ‘an art’ or ‘an art kind’ is; since I can see no substantive among between the terms, I’ll continue my use ‘artform’ in summarizing his views. Lopes’s chief constraints on a philosophically fruitful conception of an artform is that the relevant account be ‘viable’ and ‘informative’, where ‘viable’ means that the account offer plausible explications of potential counterexamples (pp. 16-18, and ‘informative’, in the sense mentioned above that it tells why certain activities are artforms and others not. Lopes specifies that an informative account solves Richard Wollheim’s ‘bricoleur problem’ (p. 108, as discussed in some of my earlier posts), that is, explains how some materials become artistic vehicles, and also “engineers the conceptual foundations of empirical art studies” and “correctly grounds art criticism” (p. 22). Lopes discussion is technical and intricate, but I think it can be summarized in the following way: 1. Artforms are ‘appreciative kinds’, which is “a kind whose nature connects to the value of its members” (p. 130), for example where the kind ‘seeing-eye dog’ fixes, or determines or guides judgment of what it is to be a good seeing-eye dog’. 2. Each artform is individuated partly by its ‘medium profile’, that is, the physical media that are used in making and constituting an artwork of that kind, together with the characteristic techniques with which the physical medium is worked (pp. 139-140). 3. Instances of artforms, that is, artworks in some or other medium, ‘involve’ or ‘exploit’ (Lopes uses both terms, seemingly interchangeably, at different points) their medium. 4. An artform is a ‘social practice’, “in the sense that engaging in the practice consists in conforming to some rules on condition that others who engage in the practice do so” (p. 148). Lopes calls this “a minimal conception of a practice”, and cites John Rawls’s early essay on rules as its source.
I suggest that Lopes’s conception massively under-describes the concept of an artform, and this in two ways that I have stressed throughout the book. First, Lopes’s bare statements that artworks (that is, instances of art kinds or artforms) ‘involve’ or ‘exploit’ their constitutive media miss the phenomenon of artistic meaning, for it is, as Wollheim, Podro, and Maynard have shown, such ‘exploitation’ is in the service of creating artistic meaning, and, so I further suggest, the point of artforms is the creation and sustaining of artistic meaning. Artforms conceived non-teleologically in the manner of Rawls and Lopes have no particular point; they can be put to any heteronomous purposes. I agree with the point about heteronomy, but that does nothing to block the further point that the creation of artistic meaning is an internal good, and so a purpose of, all artistic practices and forms. Perhaps a proponent of Lopes’s view would reply that my counter is merely a posit of philosophical anthropology, to which I can only respond that this posit is of a piece with the entire conception of the book as a project of philosophical anthropology, and is meant to be consistent with the views of body, gesture, metaphor, meaning, etc., developed throughout the book.
Taking up this first objection to Lopes’s conception, and introducing the second objection, I recall Alasdair MacIntyre’s conception of a practice, which for him is “any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partly definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.” (MacIntyre 1981, p. 175) On MacIntyre’s conception and pace Rawls and Lopes, practices are not only social activities with interlocking roles, but also processes of reflection, inquiry, and self-correction and -extension, and so are necessarily historical phenomena; that is, their historicity—their developments and decays, their constitutive use of historical exemplars of achievement and anti-models of failure, their characteristic activity of making art out of previous art-- is internal to the practice. This is yet another way through which one might explicate and develop Gombrich’s and Wollheim’s insistence that all art is an historical phenomenon. Perhaps to a degree Lopes could accommodate these points by developing his conception of how artworks exploit media and adding the historical dimension to his conception, but he would also need to re-think the beginning point of ‘appreciative kinds’, wherein judgments of goodness (e.g. ‘that’s a good seeing-eye dog’) are conceived so to speak one at a time, atomistically and ahistorically.
One final preliminary point, and one that follows from recognition of Lopes’s lack of an account of artistic meaning as internal to the practice of an artform: the conception of an artform must start from the fact of artistic meaning-making. To this end, I recur once again to a conception from Richard Wollheim, who, in his account of painting as an art, introduced the concept of ‘ur-painting’ (Wollheim pp.19-25), and in my accounts of particular artforms I’ll include as a conceptual component their ‘ur’ forms, so ‘ur-tattooing’, ‘ur-potting’, etc. Wollheim likens an ‘ur’ account to early modern accounts of how civil societies emerged out of the State of Nature. So the descriptions of the ‘ur’ acts are not meant to capture some actual historical instance, but rather to make vivid the process wherein a human agent practices the ur-art as a meaning-making activity. The ur-art begins (a) with a simple act, such as for painting a person depositing pigment onto a surface. The action is intentional under this description (Wollheim, p. 19; see also Anscombe pp. 9 and 43, and MacIntyre (1971), p. 201). The agent is reflective, and so (b) notices (i) that the deposit stands out from and against the surface upon which it is deposited, and (ii) stands in some relation to the edge of the surface. Then the agent then (c) abstracts something of mark, surface, and edge in the interest of developing visual interest in one or more of these features, an act that Wollheim calls ‘thematization’. The agent (d) makes further marks, guided by some thematized awareness of the relations among mark, surface, and edge. The process is teleological, that is, it is undertaken to achieve some end or purpose, the most general of which is creating meaning or content (Wollheim, p. 22). I understand Wollheim to be saying that we must assume something like the activity of ur-painting as (a)-(d) if we are to treat painting as an artform wherein painters create artistically meaningful artworks, and I follow Wollheim on this point.
Now I can at last turn to the consideration of the great artforms of humanity, starting in my next post with a consideration of bodily decoration and tattooing.
References and Works Consulted:
Elizabeth Anscombe, Intention (1957)
R. G. Collingwood, ‘Outlines of a Theory of Art’ (1925), in Essays in the Philosophy of Art (1969)
--The Principles of Art (1938)
Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic (1922)
G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on Fine Art (1820s)
Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘The Antecedents of Action’, in Against the Self-Images of the Age (1971)
--After Virtue (1981)
Patrick Maynard, Drawing Distinctions (2005)
Dominic McIver Lopes, Beyond Art (2014)
Thomas Munro, The Arts and Their Interrelations (1969)
Michael Podro, Depiction (1998)
John Rawls, ‘Two Concepts of Rules’ (1955), in Collected Papers (1999)
Kendall Walton, ‘Categories of Art’, in Marvelous Images: On Values and the Arts (2008)
Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)