A Review of Georg Bertram's Art as Human Practice: Some Final Questions

     In my previous posts on Georg Bertram’s Art as Human Practice I have reconstructed and sketched two versions of his account of art, a short version that turns on the central claim that art is ‘an unassured practiced,’ and a longer and fuller version that claims that art is a practice marked by ‘self-referentiality’ wherein works actualize what Bertram calls ‘(generic) constellations’. And in my first post I tried to recover the motivations for his project, in particular the desire to capture the partial insights within two main lines of thinking about the arts: one which stresses the autonomy of art and the kinds of meaning that typically arise through engagement with artworks; and one which stresses the embeddedness of artistic practices within a society’s full range of practices, and with it the sense that artworks may affect practices other than artistic ones. In a highly provisional blogging conclusion, I would like to offer some critical remarks about Bertram’s views.

     There is a great deal in the accounts with which I agree, and I’m particularly interested in the ways in which Bertram has assimilated into his account what seem to me to be two neglected points in art theories and in main lines of the philosophy of art. One frequently neglected point is that meaning in the arts is nothing (fully) propositional, and indeed cannot be thought of as finite or fully determinable. We cannot make sense of the idea that we have, with some set of propositions, however lengthy, exhausted the meaning of an artwork. This point was made by among others Richard Wollheim and Michael Podro; Bertram’s way of putting this point is that the process of interpretive engagement with and understanding of an artwork is indeed a non-finite process, one which moves within a field of tensions between grasping the work as exhibiting an order, and grasping the work as exhibiting materiality, or material elements in combinations. A second neglected thought is that in artworks there are no so to speak a priori meaning-bearing elements; rather part of what emerges in appropriately attuned engagement with an artwork is a sense of what is meaning-bearing, what is salient, and what is important. As I noted previously, Wollheim’s way of making this point was to say that artworks have a way of teaching you how to understand them.

     On two points I would wish to criticize not so much Bertram’s account as his way of articulating his points. Firstly, it strikes me that at a number of points Bertram relies rather heavily upon sets of simple oppositions. I have is discussed the opposition ‘autonomy/heteronomy’; others include ‘determinate/indeterminate and dependent/independent. The latter oppositions play an important role in his characterization of the necessarily historical and traditional character of the arts. But these sorts of oppositions seem to me to fall short of the conceptual complexity needed to capture, say, the various ways in which artists work within traditions, in sustaining, altering, innovating, partially rejecting, intensifying, merging, etc., them. This criticism leads to a second one: Bertram gives no attention to any particular works. Bertram might reply that in this book he is providing a general philosophy of the arts; it would be a further task to take up his framework and develop an applied philosophy, or an account of a particular artform or genre. But this response strikes me as only partially forceful. Bertram stresses, quite rightly in my view, that the philosophy of art should not take as central the question  ‘what is art?’, but rather the question ‘what is the value of art?’ But I do not see how one can answer the latter question without at least sketching the particular ways in which meaning arises in artworks, and so further that such meaningful artworks have value. So one would want more in Bertram’s account, such as the account Wollheim gives in Painting as an Art (1987) of primary and secondary meaning in painting practiced as an art, or of the account that Podro gave in Depiction (1998) of how artists sustain recognition and so provide works correlated with experiences that accrue meaningfulness in and through engagement with works.

     It is not clear to me how telling these objections are to Bertram’s account. They seem to me more requests for further explication than anything that strikes at the heart of his project. I very much hope that his book will be widely read and discussed.

Art's Self-relationality and Provocations: Georg Bertram's Account in Art as Human Practice

     In my previous post on Georg Bertram’s book Art as Human Practice, I began to set out his positive account of art by explicating his claim that art is an ‘unassured practice’. The backing for that claim is in essence (a) an account of human practices as historical phenomena, in particular as phenomena that are constitutively part of traditions, combined with (b) the thought that what is distinctive about art in contrast to other human practices is art’s constitutive possibility of failure, itself bound to art’s central activity of attempting, without the regular assurance of rules and rule-governed procedures, to realize the ever-changing character of artistic value. I called that the ‘shorter’ route to his positive account. Here I’ll attempt to sketch and explicate the longer route. The goal of the longer route is not simply the claim that art is an unassured practice, but, rather more fully and informatively, that it is a practice characterized, as I noted in my first post, by (i) practical reflection, (ii) self-referentiality, (iii) articulation of meaning through working and re-working what Bertram calls ‘constellations’, resulting (when successful) in (iv) ‘permeating’ other practices with something of the sense of the particular realization of human freedom that is first of all instantiated in art. I shall attempt to explicate each of these features in turn.

      ‘Art is a kind of practical reflection’. Early on Bertram introduces the claim that art is “not simply a specific kind of practice, but rather a specific kind of reflective practice, a specific formation of practices by means of which we take a stance towards ourselves in the midst of practicing our culture.” (p.3) This formulation strikes me as somewhat opaque, partly because Bertram has just introduced the notion of practices generally as things that necessarily involve a element of reflection. He seems to take ‘reflection’ as roughly synonymous with ‘taking a stance’ with regard to what it means to be human. This thought is recognizably Heideggerian; very loosely put, in Being and Time Heidegger had argued that all human (or, more precisely, all of ‘Dasein’s’) activities involve ‘taking a stance’ on the question of Being, that is, on what there is, and on what is salient and meaningful in life. All human practices, then, are reflective. So the point of this claim centers on the characterization that art is a specific kind of (reflective) practice. One way in which art embodies a distinctive kind of reflection is that art is “a practice that takes up a relation to other practices.” (p.101) Further, art has a characteristic practical effect in relation to other practices: it is a means by which “other different practices get renegotiated.” (ibid) Still, this does not seem to distinguish art in many cases from practices of, say, law or religion. So wherein lies art’s distinctiveness? Bertram’s answer is:

     ‘Art is a (reflective) practice centrally characterized by self-referentiality.’ The explication of this claim is the topic of the third chapter of the book, roughly a quarter of its length. Bertram’s most concise statement of this characteristic is this: artworks manifest themselves as containing an internal dynamic, wherein, in the appropriately attuned experience of them, certain elements emerge as significant. This happens because “an artwork relates to itself. It contains relationships in which it relates to itself and gives determination to itself.” (p.120) Artistic ‘self-referentiality’, then, refers to the distinctive dynamic wherein patterns of meaningful or significant elements emerge within a work; these elements are ordered in forms of “repetitions, variations, and other such patterns.” (ibid) Bertram adds that artworks then do not exhibit self-relations that are “central and comprehensive” (p.121), that is, they do not so to speak treat every aspect of themselves as significant, but rather they always treat as meaningful only some subset of the (potential) elements they contain, “a localized circle of elements” (ibid). This point is particularly important to Bertram because it is in this way an artwork manifests itself as “self-determining in the sense that it negotiates what is determined within it and upon what it has a determining effect.” (ibid) Artworks then exhibit a sense of autonomy, understood as self-determination, through their distinctive characteristic of dynamic and meaning-generating self-referentiality.

     But, Bertram insists, the self-referential aspect of artworks is not something that can arise in a single work taken in isolation from other works of its genre, nor even from many works in other genres. One of the themes in the book is that the arts are necessarily plural, not just contingently so. One reason, already mentioned, is that the arts are necessarily historical phenomena, in that they always arise within and in some sense actualize a tradition. To this Bertram adds that intriguing thought that for works of art to so much as exhibit significant, meaning-laden elements, they must again exist within traditions. Their self-relationality would be unable to so much as get started if it were simply the case that the emergent connection of relations and elements had to arise in works taken in isolation. But why? Why couldn’t a single work of art, considered in complete isolation from all other art works, be richly meaningful?

     In order to answer these questions and to explicate how meaning in art is coeval with its self-relationality, Bertram introduces the difficult notion of a constellation, or, more typically, of a generic constellation. If I understand Bertram, he reasons as follows: Any art work is an historical phenomenon, and part of what this means is that any and every artwork adopts some prior artwork(s) as a model. But no artwork adopts a prior artwork as a model wholesale; rather the prior work, in its adoption, is conceptualized as having certain exemplary elements in particular relations. These elements in particular relations comprise in part a constellation, though a constellation is a trans-individual phenomenon. Each work actualizes a constellation in some particular way. When a constellation is a model, it is what Bertram calls ‘generic’, and he defines as generic constellation as “a model for establishing constellations of elements and relations to other aspects in the [art]work. It arises through various readaptations of the constellations in question.” (p.173) This reviewer does not find Bertram’s characterization wholly clairvoyant, and so looks to Bertram’s examples. Bertram writes, for example, of a generic constellation of rhythm (p.175), and, perhaps more helpfully, of “the rhyme structures of lyric poetry.” (p.178) This makes the notion of a constellation seem to overlap with the notions of style (expressive nodes of elements in relations), on the one hand, and genre (characteristic clusters of themes, styles, and modes of organization) on the other. Perhaps what most clearly differentiates clusters from these related notions are the particular claims that the notion of a cluster is meant to bring together and stabilize. As partly suggested above, I take these to be (i) all art is historical and traditional, in particular in that all artworks take (some) previous works as exemplary; (ii) artistic meaning cannot in principle arise in so to speak a single work; part of how meaning arises necessarily involves the artist not just working, but also re-working, materials; (iii) there are dimensions of artistic meaningfulness that are not exhausted by relations that arise within artistic media; there are also dimensions of meaningfulness that arise across artistic media. For example, though the artistic homeland of ‘swing’ is jazz music, there are also ways of swinging in poetry and painting. Bertram is keen to insist on this third point as a way of capturing Adorno’s late thought in the essay “Art and the Arts” that artistic media have a tendency to ‘surpass’ themselves and to ‘infringe’ upon other media. Bertram’s thought, then, must be that neither the notion of style nor that of genre can saliently capture these three points.

      With this account, Bertram can then explicate the sense in which art is both autonomous and heteronomous. It is ‘autonomous’ in the sense that for artistic meaning to so much as arise, artworks and the practices of art generally must exhibit self-relationality. And coeval with the process of meaning-generation in art, artworks develop a sense of what counts as their own success (p.198) But at the same time the autonomous emergence of artistic meaning poses a kind of challenge to other practices. For Bertram a central way in which this occurs is through the development of appropriate styles of interpretation of works. These styles can in turn be used in non-artistic practices, and, to the degree that such further use is successful, practices of artistic interpretation permeate other practices. (p.148)

     There is much more detail to Bertram’s account, as well as a number of succinct and remarkably penetrating critical accounts of other philosophers of art from Kant through Danto and Menke. In my upcoming final post, I’ll attempt a short evaluation and critique of Bertram’s views.

Bertram's Shorter Route to Art as a Practice of Freedom--Review of Georg Bertram's Art as a Human Practice, Part 3

    In my two previous posts on Georg Bertram’s Art as Human Practice, I have tried to outline his general conception of the tasks of the philosophy of art and how previous philosophical work has been vitiated by its adherence to the idea that art is an autonomous practice, something wholly distinct from other human practices in its aims, characteristic products, institutions, modes of making meaning, and habits of reception. Bertram further criticizes other views for their assumption that art is a practice that can be characterized some set of well-defined, determinate features. On such an account, the philosophy of art attempts to define art by citing such features. And, Bertram thinks, an immediate consequence of this conception of the philosophy of art is that the definition of art is conceptually distinct from the question of what the value of art is. These criticisms set the constraints upon Bertram’s positive account: He must show how art is a distinctive human activity that nonetheless is necessarily bound to other human practices; he needs to characterize art in such a way that it does not as such and in every case consist of some set of determinate features; and he must start from the thought that nature of art is inextricably bound to its value.

     Bertram’s most concise formulation of his positive conception is that “art is a fundamentally unassured practice.” (p.162; Bertram’s italics) One way of explicating this claim, which emerges amidst sustained chains of philosophical reasoning, is to see it as the product of two lines of reasoning, a shorter and a longer one. The shorter line of Bertram’s reasoning, as I understand it, goes like this: human social life consists of people acting and interacting within loosely unified and determinate structures that we might call ‘practices’. Such practices in each case embody some determinate conception of ‘the good’, that is, something that people are trying to achieve by engaging in the practice, and so something that people treat as prima facie valuable. (Here I am perhaps reading too much into some scattered remarks that Bertram makes early in the book.) In any society there are many, perhaps indeterminately many, practices. A crucial feature of practices is that they are in each case historical; that is, no practice is so to speak crafted ex nihilo at a particular moment. Rather, people act, and their actions fall within existing practices. To the degree that people’s actions fall within a practice, their action is ‘determinate’. Art too is a practice, but unlike other practices it is one that is marked in every case by the possibility of the failure of its actions. What Bertram is trying to get at here, I think, is something like the thought one finds in Kant and Collingwood that it is a distinctive feature of art that artworks are not produced in ways that are wholly rule-governed, and so art-making always requires more than that the artist ‘simply’ follow a set of existing rules and conventions in order to produce an artwork, at least a richly successful one.

     This shorter line of reasoning becomes more ambitious as Bertram picks up the point about ‘determinate’ actions and weaves in a conceptual dualism of ‘determinacy’ and ‘indeterminacy’. He further adds the thought that, because the practice of art is necessarily marked by the live possibility of ‘failure’ of any of its products, that is, it is unable to guarantee its own success (p.163), it is characterized by ‘indeterminacy’. Put alternatively, art “always struggles for its own success.” (ibid) Bertram quickly draws two consequences from this. First, the struggle to make (successful) art is internal to the practice of art, and so lines of reasoning and traditions of making arise that struggle over the nature of artistic success and the changes in human practices that alter conditions of artistic success. Secondly, because these achievements, failures, and the struggles to understand them are unpredictable, they strike us as novel challenges in human life, and our attempts to come to grips with them are exemplary instances of human freedom as autonomy.

      It’s not clear how to evaluate this account, given its very high degree of abstraction and its presentation without any consideration of kinds of meaning-making that characterize art. The longer line of reasoning will partially address this through consideration of art as a kind of practical reflection upon materials in aggregates that Bertram terms ‘constellations’. This longer line will be the subject of the next blog post . . .

The Autonomy Paradigm--Review of Bertram's Art as Human Practice, Part 2

Part 2: The autonomy paradigm

     As noted in my previous post, the philosopher Georg Bertram has recently published a notably original and innovative work in the philosophy of art, Art as a Human Practice. He argues that rightly understood art is a practice among other human practices, and one that is distinguished by (a) its self-reflective nature that (b) produces, in its characteristically successful instances, a provocation and challenge to other human practices. With (a) he claims to capture what is correct in formalist views of art, and with (b) what is correct in contextualist views. Before explicating and examining his positive views, it would be helpful to look at his criticisms of prior theories, as his positive account emerges from those criticisms. In the book he gives sustained attention to the recent general accounts of art of the American philosopher Arthur Danto and the German philosopher, as well as to the classic accounts of Kant and Hegel. Additionally, he examines more briefly the work of John McDowell on the nature of aesthetic characteristics and values, and that of Noel Carroll on the nature of the interpretation and criticism of art.

     Each of Bertram’s critical discussions is sufficiently detailed so as to resist easy summary, but the conclusion that he reaches in each case is intelligible in abstraction from those accounts. Bertram argues that each of these existing accounts is vitiated by its acceptance of what he calls ‘the autonomy paradigm’ (p.16). The most basic feature of the autonomy paradigm is the theoretical treatment of art as ‘isolated’ from other human practices. Since Bertram agrees with the autonomy paradigm that art is a distinctive human practice, he accordingly thinks that the autonomy paradigm’s insistence on the isolation of art from other practices is one way of attempting to grasp this distinctiveness, but is nonetheless a simplification that distorts the basic nature of art. Firstly, the autonomy paradigm is adopted in a theoretical context wherein the leading question in the philosophy of art is taken to be ‘What is art?’ Each philosopher then produces a distinctive answer to the question. For example, Danto argues that something is a work of art if it (a) exhibits ‘aboutness’ (or as Bertram puts it, it ‘thematizes’ something), and (b) ‘embodies’ that ‘aboutness’ by possessing or employing (i) rhetoric, (ii) metaphor, and (iii) style. Bertram then notes that in each case when the philosopher has offered a definition of art, nothing has been said about the value of art. So in practice the autonomy paradigm treats the nature of art and the value of art as distinct questions. “The nature of art gets defined in isolation from its value.” (p.41)

     Secondly, the autonomy paradigm treats those characteristics of a work the possession of which make it an artwork as comprising a finite and determinate set. On such accounts, something either is or isn’t a work of art. Bertram puts this point by saying that the autonomy paradigm defines art in terms of its objective features. (p.145) A characteristic consequence of this is the view of the interpretation and criticism of art as the mere explication of features that are simply found in the work. If the particular kind of meaning that an artwork embodies is simply found in a work, then there is nothing for interpretation to do but make manifest and salient that which is perhaps latent and obscure. If a philosopher such as Menke who is in the grips of the autonomy paradigm nonetheless rejects this conception of interpretation as mere explication, he is then forced into the equally dissatisfying alternative of claiming that artworks possess meaning only as a kind of non-conceptual, non-linguistic, indeterminate liveliness, the relation of which to the rest of human life is wholly unclear.

     Bertram’s alternative account then must capture the thought that art does have a distinctive character that gives it a kind of autonomy, but not the one-sided and simplistic isolation of the autonomy paradigm. His proposal will start from the thought that the nature of art and the value of art are not conceptually distinct issues. The partial truth embodied in a reductivist account must be recovered and brought to bear on the autonomy of art rightly conceived. My next blog post will attempt to explicate Bertram’s positive account.

Review of Georg Bertram's Art as Human Practice, Part 1

         In Art as Human Practice Georg Bertram has set himself the extraordinarily difficult task of explaining how art matters in human life. One might think there are two ways of doing this: One way is fundamentally formalist: we treat art as irreducible to other human practices on account of art’s distinctive values, processes of making, modes of apprehension, and institutions, and further claim that the activity as a whole embodies a set of values that are unavailable in other practices. So art might provide steady access to, say, some sort of transcendence, or ecstasy, or intensity, or satisfaction, that is unavailable or poorly accessible in other practices. An alternative way is fundamentally contextualist: we propose that art is just one practice among others, made up of and employing the same sorts of objects, materials, and sensibilities that one finds in other practices. Perhaps on this latter account the distinctiveness of art is carried by its vocation of critique, or affirmation, or self-expression, but these values are also available in other practices. The former way secures art’s distinctiveness, but at the cost of shearing from the rest of human life. The latter way insists on the close connection with the rest of human life, but lacks resources to explain why art isn’t at most the second-best way of engaging in some value; why, for example, would we need art as critique in a society with a moderately functional public sphere? Bertram offers a philosophical account that attempts to incorporate the virtues of both accounts, that is, that insists upon the distinctiveness of art and its irreducibility to other practices, but also that explicates how a work of art in every case can only arise amidst other human practices, and how an artwork gains its meaning and point through its relation to those other practices. How is this possible?

     Here I can only sketch an outline of his position. He begins with the thought that, in order to avoid formalist autonomy and contextualist reductivisim, we must treat art from the start as (a) practical (p.53) and reflective (p.101), but also (b) that we grasp art as self-referential (p.120). The key claim is that it is only through (b), the self-referentiality of artworks, that (a), their practical reflectivity, is achieved. What is self-referentiality? Richard Wollheim once remarked to me that artworks have a way of teaching you what is important to understand them. Bertram means, I think, something quite similar: on his account artworks initiate for and through their recipients a dynamic wherein what is important to the artwork is clarified. But since the configuration of elements, none of which are unique to the practice of art, that emerges in the artistic dynamic does not simply replicate that of other non-artistic practices, the artwork represents both an instance of self-determination within its society and a challenge to its society. (Successful) artworks are necessarily provocations.

      Has Bertram succeeded in squaring the circle? His account both insists upon the autonomy of artworks in that its distinctive kind of meaningful configuration of elements arises only within the practice of art, and also insists that art is necessarily practical in the very challenge it offers to other practices. In the next few days I’ll try to explore his account, first with a discussion of what he calls the ‘autonomy paradigm’ that philosophers have hitherto adopted with regard to art and which vitiates their accounts; then with a more detailed explication and critical account of Bertram’s own position. More soon.

Animal Abuse in Art Redux--'China and Art--The Theater of the World' in San Francisco

     Back in November in a café in Berkeley a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle caught my eye: “‘Art and China’ at SFMOMA: defanged, but icky still.” “Well, they haven’t fired Mr. Magoo yet,” I thought, referring to the newspaper’s art critic Charles Desmarais. I knew the show to be the last of the three installments of the Guggenheim’s show Art and China: Theater of the World. Immediately prior to its initial opening in New York City, a controversy erupted about the show’s inclusion of three works that on the face of it constitutively involved animal abuse, and in its iteration their the works were altered so that there would be no exhibition of animals being abused. Video screens simply noted the titles and artists of two of the works, and the central work, Huang Yong Ping’s ‘Theater of the World’, a wooden and fenestrated polygon that was to have been initially stocked with insects, lizards, toads, and snakes, was shown empty. My understanding that the works were shown as initially intended in its next installment at Bilbao in Spain, but that in San Francisco the works would be shown as they had been in New York City. A number of short pieces had been published on the issues raised (my brief reflections are here: https://aestheticsforbirds.com/2014/08/25/animal-abuses-in-art-by-john-rapko/), but, to my knowledge, nothing since an initial flurry. Has anything been learned?

     Certainly not by Desmarais, who characteristically does not address any substantive issues. Insofar as anything has suffered on account of the art, it is only the poor Guggenheim itself: “After enduring protest marches and untold emails, phone calls and letters, as well as an online petition that eventually garnered more than 800,000 signatures, the Guggenheim decided not to show the work [sic; link to a New York Times article deleted] in its original form. SFMOMA has chosen to follow suit.” One senses that the exhibition in San Francisco offers nothing by way of clarifying the issues around the questions of whether the controversial works are indeed instances of animal abuse, and, if so, whether that rightly disqualifies them from being shown; and the local art critic of record can’t be bothered to discuss the issues. Another review, this one from the Bay Area’s most consistently perceptive art critic Mark Van Proyen in the on-line journal Squarecylinder, supports this suspicion: “Clearly, the animal abuse controversy that overwhelmed the initial reception of Art and China: Theater of the World now lies in a moot state of “deactivation,” and I for one am glad for it. The three offending works that initially prompted activist consternation when the exhibition opened at the Guggenheim late last year are still represented in the current, slightly smaller incarnation of the show that is now snugly ensconced in the seventh floor gallery at SFMOMA, but they are inert relics of their prior incarnations, no longer featuring signs of distressed living creatures “performing” as components of works of art.  In other words, they have been officially neutralized, as has the controversy between proponents of artistic freedom and defenders of the humane treatment of non-human sentient creatures.” Van Proyen goes on to analyze the show under the interpretive frame that there is an air of sadomasochism about much of the art, but the alleged abuse of animals in some of the works is not further discussed.

     One would think that at least the curators would have addressed the issues—But no. In the sole instance I have been able to find where the curators have been directly questioned on the topic, they have quite explicitly refused to respond. This occurred in a podcast from October 12, 2017 (https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-guggenheim-curators-controversy-surrounding-new from 21:15 to 22:59). Alexandra Munroe and Philip Tinari, two of the three curators, were asked about the allegations of animal cruelty:

Isaac Kaplan: “We’ve spoken a lot about the context of the works, and I think you’ve both done a good job of kind of situating them within the show and within the history of China. But there’s obviously the phrase that has come to define this whole debate, and which you haven’t really mentioned, and that’s ‘animal cruelty’. And I’m wondering, and I mean I just want to put it to both of you, how you think about that subject, that allegation in relationship to the works that you put on view, because, you know, it would be remiss if we didn’t directly address what I think is the animating kind of cry of those who find the work objectionable.

Alexandra Munroe: “I’m not going to comment on that . . .though, though I will say one thing: Ah um, we fully respect obviously because we, um, listened to the petition and we took action because of the petition, and the violence and the threats that were elicited by that petition. The Guggenheim is absolutely committed, and we’re already in discussion with our museum colleagues across the city and beyond, and we’re in discussion with the National Center Against Censorship, and we’re in discussion with PEN America, to use this opportunity for a very needed debate. And we are looking forward to weeks and months and possibly years of internal discussion, as well as public programming, to address the very issues that we’re raising today and that you’re wishing to raise.”

     So, when directly asked to comment on whether the controversial works involve ‘animal cruelty’, Tinari is silent and Munroe refuses to comment, and then immediately shifts to the question of censorship. Her statement that there would be public programming addressing the issue of animal cruelty is, as far as I can tell, false; in San Francisco there has been no public event other than an initial presentation of the exhibition by Munroe and Tinari. In the podcast Munroe repeatedly makes the point that the Guggenheim’s responses to the petition and changes to the exhibition were done in consultation with and the approval of the artists. What then do the artists say? The exhibition in San Francisco contains an addition to the piece Theater of the World in the form of writing in English and Chinese by Huang on an air-sickness bag. Huang asks: “It is said that more than 700,000 people are opposed to this work that involves living animals; but how many of those people have really looked at and understood this work?” He goes on to suggest that the work is “a “miniature landscape” of a civilized nation, in contrast to natural savagery, as described by Hobbes.” And then he notes that Spinoza (according to Gilles Deleuze) enjoyed staging fights between spiders. One is seemingly urged to think that because a 17th-century lens grinder enjoyed setting spiders upon each other, the spectacle of a mixture of insects and snakes and reptiles should be currently unproblematic.

     I have little more to say on the issues after three dispiriting trips to the exhibition. Huang does raise a challenge: How can one think that one is ‘opposed’ to an artwork that one has not seen? He surely insinuates that one could only legitimately oppose a work that one has seen, considered, and come to understand. Huang’s question calls to mind a topic in the philosophy of art, the so-called ‘puzzle of imaginative resistance’, which has been the topic of a dozen or two prominently published papers in the past quarter of a century. The philosopher Kendall Walton has argued that ‘the’ puzzle is really four puzzles, one of which is perhaps relevant to the question of animal abuse in art. What Walton calls ‘the aesthetic puzzle’ is this: “If a work of art is objectionable on moral grounds, does this diminish or destroy its aesthetic value?” (Walton in Marvelous Images (2008), p. 48). This question suggests one way, though only one way, of making the exhibition’s issue more precise, in something like the following ways: (a) Is any use of animals in artworks morally objectionable? Are some uses morally objectionable? Are all uses objectionable? (b) If a use is morally objectionable, does that thereby ‘diminish or destroy’ its aesthetic value? (c) However one answers (b), if a work of art is morally objectionable, is there thereby a prima facie reason for ‘censoring’ a work? And ‘censoring’ in what contexts? (d) If a work is morally objectionable, but should nonetheless not be thereby subject to censorship, but also if its aesthetic value is thereby diminished or destroyed, is there then reason for it not to be shown?—Perhaps if these questions were asked explicitly for each of the three controversial works, we might have a more reasoned and nuanced public understanding of such dicta as ‘Free Expression for Artists!’ or ‘Animal Abuse is not art!’

      My own view is that only the pieces by Huang should not be shown, precisely because their very exhibition in the manner originally intended constitutively involves the abuse of animals.

      If nothing else, seeing the works in person has motivated me to make my own art. Inspired by a series of works of Ai Weiwei, I have photographed a kind of gestural response to the pieces that constitutively involve animal abuse:

Going From 'Is That Art?' to Artistic Meaning

     I don’t remember when I first heard the sentence “Anything can be a work of art.” It must have been over thirty-five years ago, when I was first developing an open curiosity about contemporary art, particularly in its then-newly emergent genres of performance, video, and installation. One of the works that I saw repeatedly around 1980 at the Berkeley Art Museum was Robert Smithson’s ‘Mirror Displacements’, the exhibition of which I recall consisted of several distinct piles of sand or dirt, each supporting a small, rectangular, vertical mirror. Something of its supporting pile was reflected in each mirror. What does this work mean? At that time I knew nothing of Smithson’s thought, in particular his conception of a work of art as a ‘dialectic of site and non-site’, a conception that the work was meant to embody. But attaching the thought that anything can be a work of art to ‘Mirror Displacements’ seemed to begin the process of reflective understanding: well, if anything can be a work of art, then mirrors stuck in piles of dirt can be one. But since not all piles of dirt with mirrors are works of art, what further is required for this use of these materials to result in an artwork? How does one pass from ‘can’ to ‘is’?

    There is I think a standard answer to this question, and one given in the second great axiom of contemporary art: “Something is a work of art if someone says it is a work of art.” In its most common iteration, the ‘someone’ is specified narrowly as an ‘artist’, or sometimes more broadly as a member of something called ‘the artworld’, which includes at least the studios, galleries, museums, and art history departments of the world. A moment’s reflection suggests that the first sentence expresses an implication of the axiomatic second sentence, since the range of things that someone can declare to be a work of art is unrestricted. The standard exempla of the second sentence are the readymades of Marcel Duchamp, or perhaps the work of Robert Rauschenberg declaring “This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so,” although the Rauschenberg piece at least does not declare itself to be a work of art.

     A striking feature of this cluster of intuitions, perceptions, and thoughts is that it centers on the question of status of individual artifacts. If there is any urgency motivating this cluster, it seems to be generated by anxiety about classification: one is confronted by some non-standard instance of a putative work of art, and one wants to know whether it really is an artwork. Why should that matter? Well, presumably because an artifact’s being (judged) a work of art is way of singling it out for special attention, and so inclusion within special places that foster attention to particular artifacts, which with regard to the visual arts in modern life means inclusion and exhibition in galleries and museums. A second striking feature of this cluster is that axioms within it are silent about what sort of special attention artworks merit, and what it means for such attention to be rewarded. As a start one might say very roughly that what rewards such attention is something like ‘artistic meaning’. If so, then the coarse structure of a theory of art would consist of two unconnected parts: a theory of art-status oriented towards answering the question ‘What makes an artifact a work of art?’; and a theory of artistic meaning oriented towards answering questions like “What sort of meanings are distinctive of artworks?” and “How do artworks acquire distinctively artistic kinds of meaning?” It’s not obvious how on this picture one could begin to develop a theory of artistic meaning; the conceptually prior theory of art-status offers no guidance.

      What alternative might there be to a two-part account? Perhaps the beginning of wisdom in these matters is to begin with the second part, and treat art status as simply a vaguely defined point on spectrum of artistic meaning. I’ll try to explicate this obscure thought in future posts, but consider now the account of artistic meaningfulness offered art theorist Gottfried Semper back in the middle of the 19th century. Semper started from the question of how materials take on meaning in the process of creating artworks. First, they take on meaning because they are so to speak elaborated artifacts. The particular kind of elaboration that is most distinctive of works of art comes from the way in which artifacts become richly self-informative about how they are made. So, for a extremely simple example, motifs are might be added to a pot made on a wheel that evoke the process of spinning, as in the sense of torsion in Minoan pottery.

     Or something of the sense of seriality, of repeated elements emerging into view and submerging from view, might show up in decoration, as in the stupefying textiles of the Andean civilization of the Paracas.

       The second major way in Semper’s account in which materials gain meaning in their artistic uses is through metaphor. Again, some extremely simple, and also extremely common, ways in which this takes place in the visual arts globally is through the metaphorical treatment of a pot as a woman’s body, as again in a very early Minoan pot depicting a goddess.

      On this line of investigation, one begins with immersion in some of the world’s artistic traditions, and comes to recognize instances of artistic meaning ‘at full stretch’, that is, where artworks attain a high-degree of meaningfulness. These works are in turn treated as exemplary instances of art. This solves the problem of determining art’s extension, one of the problems that plagues the standard two-part approach—non-exemplary artworks have the status of works of art as a matter of the degree to which they share the kinds of artistic meaningfulness seen in the exemplary works--, and treats art-status as determined by and derivative of artistic meaningfulness.

     In the next blog post I’ll consider the insoluble problems in one of the most influential accounts of art of the past half-century, the philosophical account of art proposed by Arthur Danto.

Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg at LACMA--A Kind of Failure?

     One of the central events in the mid-twentieth century arts was the forging of a new poetics by the composer/inventor John Cage, the dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham, and the visual artist Robert Rauschenberg. To my mind this poetics has not been well characterized in the literature on the arts. One early and dismissive view was that it amounted to ‘neo-Dadaism’, presumably because of its seemingly anarchic quality and its use of materials that were not traditional vehicles of artistic expression. Another view was that it was an ‘aesthetics of chance’. This seemed to capture something central to Cage’s work, which starting in the late 1940’s involved methods of chance composition, and some of Cunningham’s choreography, which used chance to choose the order of poses and positions of the dancers. And Cunningham’s pieces were only united with their music at the actual performance, so at any moment the juxtaposition of music and dance was unforeseen by either artist, and so in a sense a matter of chance. Yet chance played no prominent part of Rauschenberg’s artistic process, and Cage and Rauschenberg both insisted that they were operating with a shared sensibility and poetics.

     The most secure route into this poetics is, I think, through considering what each artist vehemently rejected: the fundamentally Romantic model of the work of art as primarily an expression of the artist’s mind, in particular of the artist’s mental states, attitudes, moods, and emotions. Each experienced this model as oppressive in limiting the choice of materials and handling to precisely those and only those that expressed the artist’s taste. Why is the expression of taste objectionable? Perhaps the answer for this poetics is the formative and ineliminable role of the past. Taste is the present and summative achievement of a sensibility originating perhaps in early childhood, and presumably for most of us no later than early adulthood. When the composer finds herself drawn to a certain sequence of seventh chords, the dancer to a certain fluid sweep of the arm, the painter to a certain scumbling in the background, and each puts something of those into her new work, there is a sense in which the past dominates the present; that taste that was (necessarily) formed prior to the act of making selects the elements and starts to position them within the work so that they will bear certain meanings (and not others). If this is right, then what this poetics rejects is not exactly ‘self-expression’, though this is the terminology used both by critics and the artists themselves, but rather a particular model of the self in art, that is, one wherein the self that is being expressed is treated, for the purposes of making art, as fixed prior to the act of making.

       What Cage, Cunningham, and Rauschenberg shared was an ambition and an attitude towards artistic meaning. The ambition was a sort of ‘letting-be’: let sounds be sounds (and not vehicles for expression and elements of structure); let movements be movements (and not vehicles for the expression of some mysterious and otherwise unavailable interiority); let things be themselves (and not bearers of extra-artistic meaning or compositional elements). This poetics is given its greatest exemplifications in celebrated works from the late 1940’s through the 1960’s such as Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano and String Quartet no. 1, Cunningham’s Winterbranch and RainForest, and Rauschenberg’s ‘Canyon’ and ‘Monogram’. My recent trip to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to see the exhibition of Cunningham’s works entitled ‘Clouds and Screens’ and Rauschenberg’s (literally) ‘The ¼ Mile or 2 Furlong’ piece raises a question: when and why does this poetics falter?

     Many viewers have noted a decline in interest in Rauschenberg’s work around 1964, and such viewers (including myself) face the prospect of 1040 or so feet of later Rauschenberg with some trepidation. Rauschenberg said that the distance between his house and his studio determined the physical expanse of the piece; so it was part of his attempt to ‘blur the boundaries’ between art (the studio) and life (the house). Also, Rauschenberg suggested that the one sure effect of viewing the piece was that by the end the viewer would not remember her thoughts at the beginning. So the sheer expanse does something to fulfill the constitutive aim of the poetics: it eliminates the possibility of a synoptic grasp of the work. Who can so much as remember it all, much less organize, analyze, and understand it all? But one might think that this is a rather desperately literal-minded way of fulfilling the poetics.

     The exhibition of Cunningham’s work falls into three parts. In the entrance are some of the floating silver balloons that Warhol designed as part of the staging of ‘RainForest’. To the left are eccentrically placed and irregularly showing projections of two films of Cunningham dancing: a solo performance of Changeling (1957; filmed 1958) and a duet with Carolyn Brown of Night Wandering (1957; filmed 1964). To the right is a room containing 19 screens and projectors showing bits of performances of Cunningham’s company. The brief sequences are seemingly unconnected, except that occasionally there is a countdown of numbers (‘9 . . .8 . . .7’) on some screens, and less frequently a simultaneous such countdown on all the screens. This surely is meant to exemplify Cunningham’s and Cage’s practice of treating a fixed temporal expanse as the sole element shared by the otherwise uncoordinated sounds and movements in a performance. Cunningham himself had introduced the practice of staging ‘Events’ consisting in part of combined excerpts from different pieces. But this too seemed to me a failure. Why? The excerpts are all quite brief, so nothing of the sense of a sustained performance is evoked. Perhaps part of what made Cunningham’s work so compelling was the sense of conveyed in every performance of a difficult activity sustained. Seeing such an activity perhaps induces in the mind of the viewer the sense that the artist is engaged in a serious activity, though one without clear analogues in everyday life. And so one trusts the artist. I watched the performance of Night Wandering four times; in Cunningham and Brown one has artists one can trust.

Cate White's Keys to the City →

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It’s a rare work of contemporary art that demands of the viewer any knowledge of art history. Much of contemporary art requires only that its viewer utter the shibboleth ‘anything can be a work of art’, a thought secreted a century ago by the work of someone named something like ‘Marcel Duchamp’. Then just walk in and look, armed with nothing but curiosity and a camera for the selfies. It was not always so. At the beginning of the project of modern art in the 1860’s Édouard Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe and Olympia required the viewer to register the distance between what was before her eyes and the relevant works of the school of Giorgione, while at its end the appreciation of the fecundity and piquancy of Picasso’s variations on the works of Delacroix and Velázquez presupposes a steady awareness of the models, indeed the sense that Picasso’s virtuosity is partially in the service of re-vivifying the masters. So it’s a surprise that one of the Bay Area’s possibly greatest and surely most interesting artists, the painter Cate White, has attempted a demonstration piece, one summarizing her artistic practice as a piece of her life, and closely modeled upon Velázquez’s The Surrender of Breda (1634-45). The resultant Keys to the City (2016), currently on display at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, is the most richly engaging work of visual art I’ve seen from a Bay Area artist in the past decade.

Velázquez’s painting is tribute to the sweetness of character, the gentleness and mercy of the Spanish general Ambrogio Spinola. In 1625 the Spanish forces under Spinola forced the surrender of the besieged Dutch town of Breda. The defenders were allowed to leave unmolested and honored. Velázquez depicts the moment when the Dutch commander Justin von Nassau hands Spinola the key to the city. Some Dutch soldiers stand disorganized on the left, while Spanish advisers, mostly older than the Dutch, stand about on the right. Few on either side seem to observe the commanders. The Dutch commander offers the key with his right hand, while slightly bowing and cocking his head to the left. Spinola counters by bending slightly and placing his right hand on Justin’s arm. Their eyes meet and form an axle about which their bodies dance courteously. The two commanders’ horses stand nearby on either side. On the right a long line of the Spaniards’ vertical pikes striate the sky, which mostly is thick with horizontal layers of clouds, themselves crossed by diagonals of smoke. Velázquez spares the viewer a vision of eirenic gods that would infest a similar such painting by his master Rubens.

Keys to the City retains and revises all of Velázquez’s major elements and compositional arrangements. The central figures are shifted to the right, with the painter White replacing the loser and offering her key chain to a cartoonish military goon in the winner’s position. The rightward shift both de-emphasizes the transfer of the keys and opens up more space on the left for White’s ‘army’, a coterie of White’s friends and loves. The winning goon is a hairy-legged mannequin, or perhaps balloon man, whose empty eyes and slight, fixed smile suggest a post-apocalyptic world so emptied that humanity is barely a memory. His protruding penis is a spigot, a Vienna sausage, a hanging thing never touched by eroticism or violence. White stoops and cringes before the man-thing. Behind their leader, the victorious soldiers are likewise balloon heads. Over against them and visually dominating the picture are some five dozen losers, suggestive of a great motley of isolates whose various actions and passions have given them faces freed, if nothing else, from worldy ambitions. At the highest point of the losing army, a naked woman leans back as if supported by the edge of the painting, and displays a banana dick while mumbling into a microphone “sorry 4 not giving a shit.” Neither side pays much attention to the central figures, nor to each other. What used to be humanity—spontaneity, unguarded curiosity, eroticism—is preserved in the animals; unlike in Velázquez, the two horses turn towards each other and, uniquely in the painting, their gazes, one coy and the other crazed, meet.

The painting certainly induces an open-ended exploration and interrogation. Questions arise at every level, from the identity of the individual losers to White’s overall purposes. Two large questions in particular demand preliminary responses for the issue of White’s purposes to gain any determinacy: What city, and what keys? And what meaning arises from her choice and use of this particular Velázquez?

One answer to the first question is perhaps surprising but, it seems to me, irresistible. The small handful of keys, along with the CVS tag on the chain, are those of our dismal everydayness, surely including the house, the studio, and the car. The city, though, can be nothing physical; the members of the losing army do not know each other, have no unifying purpose, and surely live here and there, any place they can afford that allows them to escape the constant attentions of the government, corporations, and the worldly ambitious. All that unites the losers is their varied relationships to White. Those relationships mark out the spectrum of contemporary loves. A ‘city’ made up of kinds of attention, desires, and loves, and which is not of this world evokes Augustine’s account of the two cities, the City of Man and the City of God. Only the former is physical, but both are ‘cities’ as embodiments of different kinds of love, the one carnal, the other spiritual. 

But what could the keys to one of these cities mean to the people of the other? In Velázquez the city remains the same as the keys are transferred; the Breda of the Dutch is the very same as that of the Spanish. But the passage between Augustine’s cities is inscrutable: the two cities are unknown to each other, and passage requires spiritual conversion or degradation that God distributes for His own unknowable purposes. What could White’s keys mean to the winning goon and his happy minions? Perhaps this is part of the meaning that the use of the Veláquez has for White: entrance into the city of loves requires an abandonment of the sort of moral certainties and gentility to which Velázquez gives a supreme expression. And this would explain another feature not yet discussed: instead of the dense layering of clouds in Breda’s sky, White’s city re-enchants the inaugural love, as an aerial mother holding her infant bestows a beneficent backwards glance to the losing side as she approaches the winners. Don’t follow leaders; watch the horses.