In what follows I turn to the next major section of the book, the concept of an artform and consideration of the world’s major visual artforms, which I take to be bodily decoration and tattooing, textiles, pottery, masks, architecture, drawing, painting, and sculpture. As a preliminary to reflection on artforms generally, I’ll here try to explicate further the concept of artistic meaning with examples from anthropology and the philosophy of design. To begin: Imagine a continuum of artifactual meaningfulness, marked at one by ordinary artifacts (including tools), such as kitchen spoons, cardboard boxes, and milk crates, and at the other end by indeterminately many artworks that exhibit and embody the devices of artistic meaningfulness ‘at full stretch’ (in Patrick Maynard’s terms), such as Rembrandt’s drawing of Hendrijke sleeping, Mu Qi’s Six Persimmons, or Michelangelo’s Moses. One might then think that at the bare end of mere artifacts one encounters works that lack not only artistic meaning, but also any aesthetic considerations whatsoever; mere artifacts are determined wholly in terms of their function—spoons are to lift liquids to one’s mouth, boxes must have sides and a bottom that are sufficiently sturdy to hold the items typically intended for storage, etc. Moving along the continuum towards artworks would then be a matter of adding aesthetic and/or artistic concerns to the artifacts, as a spoon decorated with spirals and garlands is more ‘artistic’ than an undecorated one. Then further along the continuum, when the spoon is decorated to such an extent that it is difficult or impossible for it to be used in eating, so its function drops away—the marks on the handle are a kind of low-relief sculpture, the bowl itself is decorated, etc.—and it becomes more something to be contemplated than used, the ‘spoon’ enters the zone of artworks.
This seemingly irresistible manner of conceiving the passage along the continuum from artifact to artwork seems to me to embody, or at least to be threatened by, three major misunderstandings of artifacts and artworks. First, it suggests that there is a zero degree of aesthetics and artistic meaning in much of the world’s artifacts. But as the designer David Pye and the philosopher Barry Allen have urged, there is no instance of an artifact that is simply and rigidly determined by its function. As Pye put it, “the form of designed things is decided by choice or else by chance; but it is never actually entailed by anything whatever” (Pye (1978), p. 13), in particular not because of its function or typical use. That is, in the making of any artifact, whether tool or product, of there will always be a range of possibilities, with the choice determined by a range of factors, especially those of aesthetics (in the broadest sense, the attractiveness of its appearance) and economy (both of the materials and the effort of making). Second, anthropological and archeological investigations of the world’s artistic artifacts suggest not as it were a smoothly graduated continuum from bare artifacts to artworks at full stretch, but rather a kind of clustering of artifacts around three points on the continuum (which I’ll call resonators, quasi-art, and proto-art, and discuss starting in the next paragraph). Thirdly, the misguided conception of the zero artistic degree of function-determined artifacts carries with it as its contrary the conception of artworks as lacking function, a conception that cannot, it seems to me, be taken seriously in light of the vast range of functional artworks; consider, among many thousands of possible examples, the 7th-century relief in Mamallapuram, usually referred to as ‘The Descent of the Ganges’ or ‘Arjuna’s Penance’, and which celebrates a military victory and evidently has further religious functions.
So instead of positing at one end of the continuum the conception of a bare, non-artistic, wholly functional artifact—a conception that further is consonant with the hylomorphic conception of artifacts that I analyzed and rejected in earlier posts—I start with the conception of an artifact, any artifact at all, together with its ordinary uses. Such an artifact is always part of a much larger web of tools and products, and is situated at some determinate socio-historical period, and in such uses intervenes and modifies on-going ‘operations’; this conception is meant to be consonant with the conceptions of Gilbert Simondon and Tim Ingold discussed earlier. Correlatively, we can think of moving along the continuum towards artworks not as adding some meaning to a notionally pre-existent bare artifact, but rather as the relative degree of and density of mobilizations of the artifact’s environment (in the broadest possible sense, including the psychology of the maker, the social structures within which it is made, and its environmental and even cosmological dimensions). The basic thought is: elements and dimensions of artistic meaningfulness are mobilized by the mechanisms of meaning discussed earlier, and the artifact embodies artistic meaning to the extent that such mobilizations are marked, that is, perceptually encountered and recoverable for a suitably attuned viewer of the artifact.
I’ll call the first cluster along the continuum ‘resonators’, following in part a term introduced by the anthropologist Philip Lemonnier, and briefly discussed by both Lemonnier and his fellow anthropologist Alfed Gell in an exchange starting in the early 1990s. The discussion began with an unpublished paper by Lemonnier on eel traps among the Ankave-Anga, a group of approximately 1,300 forest horticulturalists in the Gulf Province on the southern coast of Papua New Guinea (‘Ankave’ refers to the particular group and their language, ‘Anga’ (or ‘Angu’) to the larger group of which the Ankave are a part).
Lemonnier gave the initial description of the Ankave eel traps in an unpublished paper in the early 1990s, which was then used as in Gell’s influential essay of 1996, ‘Vogel’s Traps’, to characterize basic aspects of artworks, or at least artistic artifacts, that were typically overlooked in provincial Euro-American discussions of the nature of art. Lemonnier finally published on the eel traps in Mundane Objects, a book from 2012, wherein he largely agreed with Gell’s account, while forcefully rejecting Gell’s assertion that the traps embodied ancestral power. In order to motivate and partially explicate the term ‘resonator’, I’ll start with a sketch of Lemonnier’s later conceptual framework, and then consider his disagreement with Gell. Lemonnier devotes four chapters of his book to descriptions of artifacts that seem to have a special reference in particular cultures; along with the eel traps, he discusses the especially sturdy garden fences of the Baruya (new Guinea) people, Ankave drums, and the model race cars of Western youths. In possessing particular resonance and being the objects of special preparation and/or care, these artifacts are ‘less than mundane’, and share four anthropological characteristics: “(1) their making and using relate different domains of social life that are thus brought together in the actors’ mind in a unique way; (2) they are part of some kind of non-verbal communication; (3) that special communication concerns key values or key characteristics of particular social relations that are usually hidden, although they pervade everyday life; and (4) the very physicality of the artefacts is involved in that process [of making and using]” (Lemonnier (2012), p. 119). These resonant artifacts are ‘less mundane’ than their counterparts of mundane artifacts, ordinary eel traps or garden fences that are not involved in characteristic #2’s non-verbal and non-propositional communication. Lemonnier suggests that the difference between the mundane and the less mundane artifacts is that the latter ‘condense’ “social relations that their construction activates” (p. 151). With regard to the eel traps, the condensed social relations include the counterintuitive origin of eels (which arose when a woman gardener sliced the very long penis of an importunate man, leaving him with a penis of ordinary length, while the longer section made its way to the river and produced eels (p. 56); gender relations (besides the gendered slicing, men make the traps and women ritually trigger them (p. 49); and political markings of patrilineal lineages (traps are part of an end-of-mourning ceremony wherein male relations of the deceased and the deceased’s wife’s new husband, construct traps).
In his earlier discussion based upon Lemonnier’s initial account, Gell notes that Lemonnier had noticed that the eel traps that are constructed in the course of the ritual have cane binding hoops that are “far stronger, more numerous and more carefully made than would be needed to restrain a few eels, and, similarly, the trapdoor is much sturdier than strictly necessary.” Gell interprets this as indicated that the eel trap is “a symbolic artefact” that functions metonymically to “empower the eel” via representing the eel, and which further contains, embodies, and communicates ancestral power (Gell (1999), pp. 208-9). In his book Lemonnier twice forcefully rejects Gell’s claim that the traps embody ancestral power with the statement that the “mere sight of the trap and observation of its painstaking fabrication tells us something about the penis/eel, not about the trap, its origin, or its ancestrality” (Lemonnier (2012), p. 61, and also on p. 141). Oddly, Lemonnier neglects to mention in this context the point about the especially sturdy binding on the ritually-produced traps; the extra effort in making the less than mundane is to a degree visible and perceptible in the artifact. For our purposes, we can say that the eel traps under Lemonnier’s description are resonators, in the sense that they condense social relations in ways that their mundane counterparts don’t. If we insist on Gell’s point about the sturdier binding, we might then say that they are further along the continuum towards artworks than mere resonators, in that their meaning as images of ancestral power is marked and embodied by the stronger and denser binding.
Between resonators and full-fledged artworks I introduce a cluster of artifacts termed ‘proto-art’ with the mysterious and much-discussed ‘Blombos Pebble’, a small, roughly rectangular and incised crayon of red ochre found at the Blombos Cave in South Africa, and securely dated to around 80K BP.
The pebble is the first-known artifact that seems to have been marked intentionally so as give it an ‘aesthetic’ appearance, that is, one that is designed to be attractive, fascinating, and attention-grabbing and -holding. Sides of the pebble are abraded, indicating that the pebble was rubbed to impart color and/or protection to something, most likely the human body for ornamentation or sunscreen, or possibly (who knows?) to clothes or the walls of the cave. The design seems a startlingly clear illustration of Gombrich’s characterization of ornamentation as first of all ‘framing’ and ‘filling’: the long edges are paralleled by straight lines ‘top’ and ‘bottom’, then the surface is bisected with another horizontal; large crossing diagonals added to fill in the demarcated area, and finally countless lighter incisions are added, with several directions but mostly parallelling the upper right-to-lower left diagonals. Lacking any knowledge whatsoever of the language, beliefs, and practices of the maker and their audience, we cannot say anything determinate about what (if anything) the pebble and its markings ‘mean’. The archeologist Clive Gamble places it at time in the prehistory and history of humanity when the millions of years when the primary technologies and innovations were instruments that extended and enhanced the hands (such as scrapers, awls, and arrow heads) were starting to be matched by technologies of enclosures (nets, slings, cups, hearths, pots). It’s striking that the basic decorative elements of enclosures (‘framing’) and extensions (‘filling’) show up in an artifact for the first time (as far as we know). My suggestion is that the pebble is an instance of proto-art, rather than an artwork proper, stems from three considerations: (a) nothing about the artifact indicates the operation of the basic metaphorical mechanisms of meaning-giving; (b) nothing can be known about the history of artistic practice (if there was such) of which the pebble forms an instance; and (c) nothing can be known about the categories—artforms and genres—that it instantiates. So the distinction, as I conceive it, between proto-art and artworks is perhaps largely stipulative: proto-art is a conceptual type where instances, although subjected to artistic-type markings, lack meaning and/or practical history and/or genre; in other words, the Blombos pebble is (seemingly) not an instance of an artform. As a corollary, we can imagine a category of ‘quasi-art’, where proto-art seems to look to, and partially to be modeled upon, actual artworks, but where features of meaning, relevant history, and genre are lacking.
So the imaginative exercise of constructing a continuum of mundane artifacts—less than mundane artifacts/resonators—proto-art—artworks helps us clarify what will count as artworks, and motivates the interest in philosophical reflection upon the concept of artform. That will be the subject of my next post, the final one before considering the great artforms.
References and Works Consulted:
Barry Allen, Artifice and Design: Art and Technology in Human Experience (2008)
Gregory Currie, ‘Aesthetic Explanation’, in Arts and Minds (2004)
Clive Gamble, Origins and Revolutions: Human Identity in Earliest Prehistory (2007)
Alfred Gell, ‘Vogel’s Nets: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps’, in The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams (1999)
E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (1979)
Pierre Lemonnier, ‘The eel and the Ankave-Anga: material and symbolic aspects of trapping’, unpublished (1992), referenced in Gell (1999), pp. 208 and 213, and published in Tropical Forests, People and Foods: Biocultural Interactions and Applications to Development (1993), ed. E.-M. Hladik et al.
--Mundane Objects: materiality and Non-verbal Communication (2012)
David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship (1968)
--The Nature and Aesthetics of Design (1978)
Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)
Thomas Wynn, ‘Layers of Thinking in Tool Behavior’, in Tools, Language, and Cognition in Human Evolution (1993), ed. Gibson and Ingold