On Hal Foster's Brutal Aesthetics: Dubuffet, Bataille, Jorn, Paolozzi, Oldenburg

     One of the characteristic activities that goes on in an artistic practice is reflection upon that very practice of which it is a part. Much of this reflection is implicit within the works produced within the practice. Any work of art embodies a kind of reflective attitude towards a practice; the most routine work, for example, carries the sense that the practice is worth continuing, and that its routine manifestations are at least ‘good enough’ for whatever range of human needs, interests, and desires they are meant to satisfy. More ambitious artistic works will typically draw selectively from earlier instances of the practice, and some reflective evaluation is given implicitly in the choices of what is refused, what retained, and what extended from prior instances of the practice. A ‘radical’ work will embody an attitude of large-scale rejection (‘No more monuments!’; ‘No more bourgeois painting!’), but will also necessarily invoke, by hybridization and analogy, other artistic practices, and their genres and histories, in building up its own distinctive kinds of meaningfulness and significance. Also accompanying an artistic practice is a great deal of talk about the practice, both from those who work within the practice and those who encounter and appreciate its works. Some times the talk of those encountering the works may seem internal to the practice, as when the relevant artists are highly sensitive to the judgments of those who encounter the works; at other times the judgments of those who are not the relevant artists are ignored by insiders and so seem external to the practice, as expressed in the composer Milton Babbitt’s notorious ‘Who cares if you listen?’.  

     One of the most distinctive features of the contemporary visual arts is the relative porosity of distinctions among art forms (such as painting and sculpture) and genres. A corollary of this is the relative prominence of explicit linguistic or quasi-linguistic evaluative reflections within a traditional genre such as painting, as in Joseph Beuys’s placard stating ‘The Silence of Marcel Duchamp is Over-rated’ or Philip Guston’s painting of a monumentalized canvas next to the names of Masaccio, Giotto, and Tiepolo. Both of these features are particularly distinctive in contrast to main lines of modern art, especially those that highlight a concern for a puristic use of artistic media, one that aims to minimize or eliminate features and values of an artwork that can be readily realized in different media, while foregrounding those features that are mostly limited to those of a particular art form, such as linearity in drawing, or atmospheric coloring in painting.

     In recent decades historians of modern art have come to focus less on figures in late modern art whose works are readily grasped as part of a concern for medium purism, such as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, and more on figures who represent alternative paths. One outstanding instance of this more recent concern is Alex Pott’s Experiments in Modern Realism (2013). Potts therein considers a range of figures, including the Americans Pollock, Claes Oldenburg, and Allan Kaprow, but also the Frenchman Jean Dubuffet, the Dane Asger Jorn, the Scot Eduardo Paolozzi, and the Germans Wols and Joseph Beuys, as exemplars of different strains of modernist realism, understood as “a broad tendency defined by the significance accorded the referential, outwardly directly, representational aspects of an artwork.” (Potts p.24) Potts follows Roman Jakobson’s canonical essay ‘Realism in Art’ (1921) in noting that the use of the term ‘realism’ with regard to the arts encompasses many features, not all of which in practice are exemplified in any particular artwork or artistic movement. These figures are not so to speak conventionally realistic in their works, but rather avant-gardist without practicing abstract art. Potts notes that some of the figures are motivated to make realist works as part of their response to political concerns and social criticism, but he does not suggest that any single aim or ideal or commitment binds these figures together.

     The prominent historian of recent art Hal Foster has in his Mellon lectures of 2018, and now published as Brutal Aesthetics: Dubuffet, Bataille, Jorn, Paolozzi, Oldenburg (2020), taken up a sub-set of Potts’s figures, added the writings of the philosopher, novelist, and pornographer Georges Bataille on the topic of Paleolithic art, and treated them as part of a single multi-faceted project undertaken from the mid-1940’s to mid-1960’s: the creation and practice of what Foster in the first chapter calls ‘brutal aesthetics’. The time-span of the project indicates its motivation: an artistic response to the devastations of World War II. For Foster the formulation of the project’s motivation was primarily and proleptically given by the German literary theorist and critic Walter Benjamin in an essay of 1933, ‘Experience and Poverty’.  As in Benjamin’s better known essay ‘The Storyteller’, Benjamin distinguishes two senses within the English word ‘experience’: Erfahrung, the sense of experience as something undergone, something that admits of accumulation, and something which can be transmitted in stories and teachings; and Erlebnis, as something undergone in a temporally-bounded period, something felt and subjective, and something not readily admitting of linguistic formulation. (Foster oddly characterizes these two as ‘wisdom’ and information’ respectively. (p.1) On Benjamin’s account, modern Europeans after World War I exhibited a loss of their previous generations’ ability to tell stories, and so a loss of Erfahrung. Foster sees this alleged condition as intensified by World War II and the subsequent spread of industrialized consumer culture throughout the West. Benjamin urged artists to face up to this condition and “to start from scratch” (Foster p.2) This is a kind of ‘positive barbarism’, in that it involves a whole-sale rejection of whatever counts as part of ‘civilization’, and the pursuit of which Foster thinks unites the figures he treats. The sense of ‘brutality’ in this barbarism is suggested in Dubuffet’s attempt to develop an ‘art brut’. In Dubuffet’s case, and by extension also of the other figures treated, this ‘brutality’ has two aspects prima facie: first, Dubuffet successively appeals to the models of artistic production by those ‘outside’ civilization: the mad, children, the Native or indigenous (pp.5-6). Second, Dubuffet allegedly attempts to “seek a ground in brute materiality.” (p.6) For Foster this second aspect amounts to a willed negation or inversion of deep-seated conventional values in art. So instead of a painting suggesting the vertical orientation of the artist, the viewer, and an implied visual field, a painting rather the painting suggests something at least worked upon horizontally; and instead of the painting and its materials being treated as a cultural luxury and valuable, the product and process of painting are conceived as shit and a kind of psychic regression to what Sigmund Freud indicated as infantile pleasures centered on the anus. Foster then generalizes Dubuffet’s motivation and these two characterizations of his artistic practice into a ‘brutal aesthetics’ shared among the five figures treated in the book. Foster immediately notes that brutal aesthetics cannot be practiced solely as conceived in this austere manner, because the artist, in attempting to start over, never finds themselves with a blank slate. Rather they are confronted with, and so use as their materials, the heterogeneous stuffs and junk of industrialized life. So practitioners of brutal aesthetics, like most of the artists throughout human history, must conceive of themselves as something like the ‘bricoleurs’ famously described by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in La Pensée Sauvage (1962), practitioners of bricolage, everyday meaning-making through collage, juxtaposition, and alteration of what is at hand, regardless of whether the materials are hitherto accredited as vehicles of artistic meaning and regardless of how such materials have hitherto been worked.

     Foster devotes a chapter to each of the five figures, and proceeds in a roughly chronological order in terms of their achievements most relevant to brutal aesthetics. Dubuffet’s work and thought exhibits the characteristics and problems of brutal aesthetics most clearly. In the 1940’s Dubuffet attempted to model his work successively on figures of ‘otherness’, that is, cultural types whose sensibilities lie outside the mainstream: the child; the ‘common man’ who makes graffiti; and the insane. In each case he comes to realize work made on these models is never ‘outside’ the mainstream of European civilization and its art. The ‘outside’ figure is revealed as already part of, or destined to be, part of the mainstream; and Dubuffet’s resultant works in any case come to be just more products of the culture. In the mid-late 1940’s Dubuffet begins to use non-traditional materials such as earth, gravel, and sand, and conceptualizes the basic action of the painter as ‘besmearing’ (p. 56), and this latter poetics, rather than the former appeal to kinds of outsiders, forms the basis of Dubuffet’s artistic practices at least through the 1950’s. Foster claims that the characteristic effect of this latter poetics is the cultivation of a sense of artistic practice as a continual de-figuring, transforming, and yet preserving of three basic established artistic conceptualizations. First, within an art form such as painting, Dubuffet treated subjects in ways that conflated sub-genres; so, for example, Dubuffet remarks that “A man, his physical person, is a small world like any other, a landscape” (quoted on p. 62). Second, Dubuffet’s manner of treatment “plays with the contradiction between painting steeped in material and painting open to transformation.” (p. 64). Third, Foster obscurely suggests that there is a basic tension in Dubuffet’s work between its foregrounding of materiality and its ‘addressing the mind’ (ibid). By the late 1960’s Dubuffet comes to re-conceptualize his artistic practice to such an extent that its contact with his initial motivation is uncertain. Dubuffet’s late aim is to induce his audience to re-enact mentally the process wherewith the work is made (p. 66), and he acknowledges that the figure of ‘the man without culture’ is an ideal and utopian fiction.

     The remaining four chapters show how the various practitioners of brutal aesthetics are to some degree likewise afflicted with double binds, and in some cases to some degree evade the double binds through lessening the interest in starting over, and focusing rather on cultivating something like the model of the bricoleur. Bataille’s interest in Paleolithic painting, especially at Lascaux, suggests to Foster another attempt to return to origins (p. 102), but somehow Bataille is less afflicted by double binds than Dubuffet because of Bataille’s greater awareness of paradox of the attempt to break outside of social bonds (p. 103). Jorn’s paintings focus upon ‘the creature’, and Jorn writes in 1950 that “[w]e must portray ourselves as human beasts” (quoted on p. 108). Foster notes that this is close to Dubuffet’s poetics, but he insists that Jorn escapes Dubuffet’s double binds to the degree that “the creatures in Jorn point to cracks inside the law here and now, cracks that art might reveal, even open up, gaps in the symbolic order that, again, might be turned into point of purchase where power can be resisted or at least rethought, where new social links might be imagined and old displaced ones recovered.” (p.137) Foster gives a similar assessment of Paolozzi, whose positive barbarism consists in the attempt to practice a brutal aesthetics of something like collage that includes the imperative to “damage, erase, destroy, deface and transform” (Paolozzi quoted on p. 157), and whose bricolage-type work in sculpture and prints likewise evades something of Dubuffet’s double binds because it registers real contradictions “as fragments, rearrangements, breakdowns, gaps.” (p. 193) Finally, Oldenburg is given a similar and largely positive treatment. Already in 1956 the young Oldenburg stated that his art strives for the simultaneous presentation of contraries, which will come to include aesthetic values of the rigid and the pliant and the small and the large, and contents such as sex and destruction and ultimately life and death (p. 195). Oldenburg’s familiar use of heterogeneous everyday materials and shifts in scale make him the very model of positive barbarian and brutal aesthetician. What defeats Oldenburg’s project, so Foster claims in the book’s final paragraph, is not any internal contradictions, but history itself: “brutal aesthetics was no match for the society of the spectacle” because (?) “[Oldenburg’s] art, his time—our time—does not allow a redemptive last word.” (p. 247) Foster’s thought here is particularly obscure, but perhaps he is suggesting that brutal aesthetics is only sustainable when the artist, like Jorn, Paolozzi, and Oldenburg, works with and reveals the fissuring, fragmentation, and heterogeneity within everyday practices involving industrialized projects, and that a distinctive feature of the society of the spectacle, as diagnosed by the French theorist Guy Debord, was that social realities manifest themselves publicly as seamless spectacles wherein no sense of conflicting materials, frames, or views intrudes.

     The chapter on Oldenburg is very much of a piece with the rest of the book’s approach, concerns, and style, and exhibits the book’s achievements and limitations as a piece of art history. The thematic concern with positive barbarism and brutal aesthetics organizes the figures in an illuminating way as providing lines of development in post-WWII European and American visual art that eschew abstraction and pursue ‘realism’ in some of the many senses of the term. It would be fruitful to extend and test Foster’s approach to the other figures treated by Potts. The limitations here are familiar from Foster’s other books and perhaps also in a great deal of academic writing about recent art. Little sense is given of what it is like to encounter, look at, and reflect upon the works. On only the rarest of occasions does Foster even note stylistic features; one such instance in the book is his helpful but characteristically unexplicated remark that “Oldenburg used softening not only to deform things but also to de-define them in a way that might disclose “unities” across otherwise disparate objects.” (p. 237) The framework occasionally seems Procrustean in its temporal limitations (for example, the important works of Dubuffet and Oldenburg after 1970 are undiscussed), as well as distorting the sense of the artists’ full achievements (for example, Paolozzi’s prints from the 1960’s that treat material from the philosopher Wittgenstein, and which are widely considered among his finest works, are not so much as mentioned). Foster’s explications of the content of the artworks is mostly limited to citing whatever comes to his mind from the writings of Freud and Lacan.

     Still, Foster’s studies raise the question of the character and content of artistic projects, and what sort of criteria are relevant to their evaluation. In outline Foster’s account is simple: 1. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, a number of European and American artists conceive of the project of positive barbarism, whose artistic expression is a brutal aesthetics. This aesthetics is characterized by a thorough-going rejection of inherited art forms, at least in their characteristic manners; the attempt to start over; and the adoption of the model of the artist as bricoleur. 2. Double binds arise as artists attempt to realize the aesthetics; the source of the double binds is ultimately the recognition that any attempt to start over necessarily draws from some inherited materials, models, and practices. 3. Artists evade the double binds to some degree by resolutely adopting the model of the bricoleur and focusing upon the heterogeneity within the everyday life of industrialized societies. 4. The (artistic?) effectiveness of the project ends with the rise of the society of the spectacle, which puts an end to the public manifestation of the heterogeneity of everyday life characteristic from the end of World War II until the mid-late 1960’s.

     The concept of a ‘double bind’ in human action was developed during this same post-WWII period by Gregory Bateson and his colleagues as part of research into learning broadly and also schizophrenia in particular. The notion of a ‘double bind’ depends upon the conceptualization of human communication as multi-leveled and multi–aspected. In a simple example, some content is conveyed, such as the command ‘Do X’. But something of the manner and/or context in which the command occurs sends a different content of ‘Don’t do X’. The receiver of the command is then in a double bind, that is, to the extent that the receiver accepts the authority of the sender to command, the receiver is ‘bound’ both to do and to not do X. In human life we deal with local double binds in various ways. We can simply ignore them. In many cases we can treat them as part of a learning process wherein we learn some richer conceptualization of the situation that doesn’t set the different commands at odds with each other. Foster seems to treat Dubuffet as offering just such an instance when he notes that Dubuffet came by the late 1960’s to conceptualize the ‘brut’ not as something existing outside of all human civilization and that could somehow ground a new kind of artistic practice, but rather as an ideal to be striven for. Foster seems to think that this is a kind of refutation of Dubuffet’s project, but I cannot see any reason not to think of it as rather an instance of cultural learning through testing and feedback.

     This criticism of Foster’s use of the concept of a double bind suggests a further and general problem with Foster’s analysis. Foster assumes as outlined above that something like the small set imperatives and conceptualizations characterizes an artistic practice. Is that so? Consider by contrast the account offered by the art historian Michael Baxandall in his book Patterns of Intention (1985). Baxandall approaches the topic of the structure and content of an artistic practice by first considering a well-documented engineering project, the design and construction of the Tay Bridge in Scotland in the late nineteenth-century. The primitive structure of the engineering process is first marked with an imperative: Build a bridge! Then a very large number of secondary considerations are brought to bear upon the process, including the geographical location, the memory of a previous disaster, the evolving technology of girders, and contemporaneous public tastes. Baxandall calls the general imperative ‘the charge’, and the lengthy list of heterogeneous secondary considerations ‘the brief’. Transferring this to an account of an artistic practice, Baxandall notes that in the arts the charge is typically set by the artist’s understanding of prevailing practices. The kind of broad rejection of prevailing arts considered here would be a kind of avant-gardist charge characteristic of a great deal of prominent twentieth-century art. But it is implausible to think that the briefs of the various practitioners of brutal aesthetics are reducible to the small set of considerations cited by Foster. It may well be, particularly in the case of Dubuffet, that Foster is right in thinking that the artists sometimes experienced themselves as caught in a double bind, but as noted in the previous paragraph the double bind is typically a local and transient phenomenon within a much richer conception of a developing artistic practice. This richer conception would seem to lend itself more readily to description in terms of Baxandall’s account of charges and briefs, rather than Foster’s more austere conception of single imperatives and double binds.

--John Rapko

References:

Gregory Bateson, Steps To an Ecology of Mind (1975)

Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (1985)

Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty” (1933) and “The Storyteller” (1936) in Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927-1934 (1999) and Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938 (2002)

Guy Debord, La Société du Spectacle (1967; multiple translations)

Hal Foster, Brutal Aesthetics: Dubuffet, Bataille, Jorn, Paolozzi, Oldenburg (2020)

Roman Jakobson, “Realism in Art” (1921) in Language in Literature (1987)

Claude Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée Sauvage (1962; newly translated 2021)

Alex Potts, Experiments in modern realism: world-making, politics and the everyday                  in postwar European and American art (2013)

Contemporary Art: As a sub-genre forms . . .

     In his book Kant after Duchamp, the French art theoretician Thierry de Duve gave one of the most prominent and influential characterizations of contemporary art. De Duve claimed that Duchamp showed that any material can serve as a vehicle of an idea, and accordingly any material can become the work of art or part of a work of art. On such a conception of the role of materials in visual art, and if there are no further criteria governing the artistic process, in making works of art an artist is no longer bound by criteria, models, stringencies, techniques, and skills native to the tradition of working within any particular medium. On the traditional or pre-Duchamp conception an activity such as painting is practiced in an enormous variety of ways, but amongst these ways there is one broad strain in which it is practiced as an art; likewise with other activities such as sculpting or drawing. We might call painting, sculpting, and drawing, when practiced as arts, artforms. Such artforms are historical phenomena, in the sense that their instances arise within cross-generational traditions of making. Another characteristic of traditional artforms is that they are typically subdivided into genres and sub-genres; so painting, for example, includes genres such as historical painting, still-life painting, and abstract painting. But de Duve argues that in Duchamp, as well as in contemporary art, we have only art in general--the sheer idea of art, art qua art--, and a non-finite range of instances of art, no one of which is as it were closer to the general concept of art than another. With Duchamp the practice of art primarily in artforms (such as painting and sculpture), and so within genres (such as landscape painting or portrait sculpture), comes to an end. The affectedness, the lived importance of the media (painting, sculpture) disappears with this or it withers away and what we have are individual works of art and the concept of art.  

     Are there alternatives to de Duve’s Duchampian conception of contemporary art? Another route towards gaining a perspicuous overview of contemporary art might start from the thought that a distinctive feature of contemporary art, at least in relation to the previous century of modern art starting in the mid- to late-nineteenth century is the prominence of expanded art forms and new genres. An expanded art form such as painting is marked by the non-traditional uses of traditional materials (such as paint poured or dribbled onto a canvas); use of non-traditional materials (such as elephant dung deposited onto a canvas); and, most challengingly, activities that do not involve depositing pigment onto a surface, but which invoke an indeterminate range of conventions, values, and kinds of meaning hitherto associated with painting (perhaps such as the artist rolling in mud and treating the result as an outdoor painting. Along with expanded media there emerge in contemporary art new genres, such as conceptual (or neo-conceptual) art and installation art, as well as rapid adoption of new technologies as artistic media, as with video art, computer art, and internet art. So whereas de Duve treats contemporary art as exhibiting a meager ontology of a single concept (that of ‘art’) and a non-finite set of instantiations of that concept, the latter approach treats the emergence, multiplicity, and plasticity of art forms and media as central.

     One attractive feature of the latter conceptualization of contemporary art is that it directs attention to and provides some orientation for thinking about developments within contemporary art, such as how new media, genres, and sub-genres emerge and develop resources for artistic meaning. A recent example of the seeming emergence of a sub-genre is characterized in a new book by the film theorist and curator Kim Knowles entitled Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices. Knowles opens the book describing how in 2008 she saw Loretta, a 4-minute experimental film by Jeanne Liotta that obliquely addresses the death of Liotta’s mother. Knowles characterizes the film is “an example of how questions of materiality, the body, death and mourning come together in a forceful appeal to the senses.” (31) Part of the artistic power of the film derives from its use of seemingly obsolete techniques—the background of pulsing and radiating yellow is hand-colored; some of the images are photograms; much of the salient imagery derives from film sprockets. By the time that Liotta made the film in 2003, these techniques and materials had been widely abandoned in film-making in favor of digitalization, and so bore the sense of obsolescence. But it a striking feature of a range of instances within contemporary experimental film-making that these ‘obsolete’ materials continue to be used. Knowles introduces the term ‘photochemical practice’ to collect all instances of film-making, from Man Ray’s films in the 1920’s through to the present, that highlight one or more of such techniques. Knowles’s book aims centrally to give an account of the poetics of photochemical practices as characteristic of this newly emergent sub-genre in film.

     Knowles finds part of an initial formulation of photochemical film practices in Peter Gidal’s canonical essay ‘Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film’ of 1975. (pp. 55-6) Gidal’s favored conception of film had three marks: first, such films were ‘materialist’ in the sense of foregrounding the process of their own making, both with regard to the materials used and the time spent; second, they were ‘structural’ in foregrounding perceptually evident ordering mechanisms, particularly (in the words of P. Adams Sitney) “fixed camera position [...] the flicker effect, loop printing, and re-photography off the screen”; and third, following from these two, they were ‘anti-illusionist’, in the sense of offering the viewer no narrative or indeed anything that would encourage the fantasy of seeing as it were through the projected image, rather than attending to the material, optical, and aural qualities per se of what is presented. Knowles adopts the term ‘materialist’ as roughly synonymous with photochemical, and for the rest of the book uses ‘materialist’, because this term suggests a broader artistic situation—not just the use of a particular film stock and apparatus, but the full conception that includes the creative process, the scene of the projection or installation of the film, and especially the practice’s connection with broader philosophical and cultural concerns.

      However, Gidal’s conception of materialist film is too narrow to capture the specific characteristics of contemporary artistic film that interest Knowles. She notes that Gidal had no particular interest in the body except as something used in the service of anti-illusionism; in Gidal’s theory “physical encounters and tactile engagements are treated only as a means to disrupt the fabric of illusionism and draw attention to the actual production of images.” (p. 58) In Knowles’s conception the prominence of concern with embodiment in materialist film is more closely connected with its proximate positive aims, which include inter alia drawing attention to surfaces, exhibiting the power of sensuous communication (p. 71), and heightening the awareness of the film’s ‘thingness’, its material presence. (p.206) And likewise Gidal’s conception would miss the ultimate aims served in the realization of these proximate aims, which for Knowles involve broader cultural concerns, especially the exhibition of an eco-poetics or ecological awareness (in Chapter 3) and developing and sustaining artistic communities outside the mainstream (in Chapter 4). The concern for embodiment in recent materialist films is prominently expressed in two ways. First, the films express what Knowles alternatively calls ‘tactility’ (p. 53) or ‘haptic visuality’ (p. 61). These values are invoked by the previously noted interest in drawing attention to the surface of the image, but also in the film-maker’s undermining of the sense of a single viewpoint (ibid). Second, these films typically highlight their sense of being ‘artisanal’ or hand-made (p. 71) This second feature is characteristic of many experimental films since the early 1920’s, but Knowles notes a shift around 1990 towards more hand-printing and processing done by the artists themselves. The date is important in that it indicates that this shift towards intensified hand-production pre-dates the shift in film technologies from the analogue and photochemical to the digital; accordingly the sense of obsolescence carried by recent photochemical process supervenes on older and more durable concerns for highlighting the sense of the film as a made thing.

     There is much else in this short book aside from this conceptualization of recent materialist films, but perhaps enough has been said to motivate the suggestion that a conceptualization of contemporary art that foregrounds ‘mediations’ such as expanded art forms and new genres is preferable to the more standard account highlighting the instantiations of the concept of  ‘art’. All art, including contemporary art, is an historical phenomenon, and part of what that involves is that any work of art ‘builds upon’ prior works, whether by treating prior works as models, or through selective incorporation and elaboration of features of earlier works, and correlatively through selective or in some cases large-scale rejection of features of prior works. And on a larger scale art drifts, as George Kubler influentially put it in the early 1960’s; traditions are formed and sustained and abandoned; genres and sub-genres emerge, develop, merge, and decay. De Duve’s account, and the dominance of that account in recent theorizing about contemporary art, seem to have no way of taking this into account.

References:

Thierry de Duve, Kant After Duchamp (1996)

Peter Gidal, ‘Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film’ in Structural Film Anthology (1976)

Kim Knowles, Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices (2020)

George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962)

P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000 (2002; 3rd edition)

Barry Schwabsky on Contemporary Painting, Part 2

     In my previous blog post I sketched the account of contemporary painting offered by Barry Schwabsky in his recent book The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting. Briefly summarized: Schwabsky urges that (a) contemporary painting is first of all distinguished from modern painting by the former’s greater degree of self-consciousness. This heightened self-consciousness is corrosive to the extent that, in contrast to modern painters, the contemporary painter cannot fully commit herself to and identify herself with a particular manner or style of painting. Instead, a central demand of contemporary painting is for flexibility in genre and style (pp. 8-9); (b) contemporary painting has a distinctive content, namely, self-invention (p. 10) This self-invention unfolds in the painter’s engagement with a distinctive project that is extended for years and perhaps decades and is in principle open and unfinished.

     But what do (a) and (b) have to do specifically with painting? Schwabsky provides two specifications that link the general points to painting. First, he says that contemporary painting makes a specific contribution to artistic thought generally in cultivating “the tactile dimension of things, . . .  a plastic relation to materials that (because of the potential this relation offers for continual feedback between matter and sensation) is also a proprioceptive activity.” (pp. 13-14) Second, he says that in contemporary painting, as previously in modernist and Conceptual art, “every artist’s work should stake out a position,” and that in painting this position should include “the representation of an idea about painting.” (pp. 9-10) All these formulations are from the preface to the volume Vitamin P in 2002. Later in the volume he characterizes this alternatively as a contemporary painting’s containing ‘an allegory of itself’. (p. 256)

     How might this general characterization of contemporary painting contribute to our understanding of a particular body of work? Among the two dozen pieces of art criticism included in The Observer Effect, the account from 2010 of the work of the painter Dana Schutz offers the clearest exemplification of Schwabsky’s general account. Indeed, Schwabsky explicitly writes that “Schutz could well be the most contemporary painter of all today.” (p. 257) This is because her work is “perhaps the most salient example” of a contemporary painter’s artistic project that embodies the very ideas that Schwabsky has used to characterize contemporary painting generally, that is, of self-invention arising from the sense of contemporary painting’s ‘gratuitousness’. As I noted in my previous post, Schwabsky claims that the sense of artistic gratuitousness emerges from the recognition of a contemporary artistic genre’s loss of the sense that it embodies solutions to problems. I find Schwabsky’s thought here difficult to explicate, but I take him to be saying that the kind of self-invention characteristic of contemporary painting is marked by a sense of arbitrariness; it is not, as modernist painting thought itself to be, dependent upon the recognition of a prior existing problem, and so is not prima facie a solution to anything. Schwabsky does say that this distinctively contemporary self-invention is paradoxical, seemingly because it represents a response to two demands that cannot be mediated. He writes: “The contemporary artist contends with two contradictory directives. For your work to be significant, and not merely art, don’t be formalist, let the world in! But for your work to be significant as art, it must investigate and criticize its own presuppositions thereby turning whatever comes within its purview into mere grist for art.” (p. 261)

     Schwabsky thinks that Schutz mediates these contradictory directives by inventing a peculiarly paradoxical kind of imagery: subjects who eat themselves. From 2003 to 2005 made a number of paintings of figures eating themselves—their eyes, their faces, their chests. Schutz has said that these works represent simultaneously self-devouring and self-creation (p. 256) As such, they are salient instances of the self-allegorization that Schwabsky treats as central to the content of contemporary painting: the dimension of self-eating immediately expresses the ‘formalistic’ dimension of contemporary painting wherewith a painting is always a response to and a continuation of prior paintings; the dimension of self-creation, Schwabsky suggests, expresses a way in which a painting “investigate[s] and criticize[s] its own artistic presuppositions.” Schutz herself puts this latter point differently and aspirationally when she says that “I want the paintings to take into account what’s going on outside them.” (pp. 261-2) Schwabsky summarizes this informally as: “The paintings should be the contrary of what they depict, or at any rate nonidentical with it, rather than tautologically duplicating it.” (p. 262)

     I wonder. Schwabsky is well aware that no painting, contemporary or otherwise, is identical to its subject; the appreciative response to a painting necessarily includes an open array of dimensions of at least history, handling, composition, and style, and of which recognition of the subject and its associations is only ever one among many. Perhaps what Schwabsky is concerned with, and concerned to combat, is a tendency to treat the interest in a painting’s subject as exhausting the interest a painting as a whole; one might think that such an impoverished response to a painting is embodied in the contemporary practice of referring to a contemporary painting as a (mere) ‘image’. And so Schutz’s thematization, if indeed that’s what it is, of the difference between subject and painting is a mark of its seriousness and of its enrichment of the practice of contemporary painting. Even so, it does not seem apt to characterize this thematization and the consequent allegorization of the practice of painting as ‘the contrary’ of what’s depicted. Schwabsky’s formulation would assimilate Schutz’s practice to something like a painting consisting of the words ‘this is not a painting’ painted on a bare square of canvas.

     This criticism does nothing to diminish Schwabsky’s sense of Schutz as an exemplary contemporary painter. Nor does it count against Schwabsky’s general account of contemporary painting. There are though, a number of points where Schwabsky’s account needs qualification and perhaps re-formulation. One problem concerns Schwabsky’s characterization of the dimension of contemporary painting that is so to speak within the tradition of painting and so immediately succeeding modern painting. Schwabsky characterizes the concern of painting to embody a response to and continuation of painting as ‘formalist’. But this is an implausibly  narrow way of characterizing such a concern. Continuing and sustaining the practice of painting need not involve a concern with ‘formal’ elements, or with elements characterizing ‘formally’, if that means something like with dimensions of space, line, depiction, planarity, etc in determinate relations. It seems to me that what Schwabsky is trying to characterize in invoking the distinction between painting as a formalist practice and painting as something responsive to the wider world would be more accurately, if more academically, put as the distinction between the practical conception of painting as an autonomous activity, and a conception as a heteronomous activity. This formulation requires in turn further specification of what is meant in this context by ‘autonomy’ and ‘heteronomy’. (I have addressed this point at length in my forthcoming book Return to Darkness).

     One way in which the formulation of the general account of contemporary matters in understanding Schutz’s achievement arises with reflection upon Schwabsky’s rather immediate characterization of the self-eaters as paradoxically embodying the alleged painter’s dilemma of ‘formalism’ vs. ‘responsiveness to the world’. As I’ve suggested, this need not be seen as a matter of contradictory directives. A different way of understanding Schutz’s subject matter and its contribution to her painting practice is to note that the ‘self-eating’ suggests a kind of making (that is, nourishing of the self) which is an un-making (that is, an attack upon the self). Or, put conversely, the self-eating is a making in the sense of something done, with the un-making an undoing of an existing self. Either way, this formulation places the poetics of Schutz’s self-eaters within a long line of artistic practice—a kind of making which is an un-making. One immediately thinks of the work of Eva Hesse, wherein Hesse attempted a kind of doing/making that undoes and unmakes one pole of a binary opposition (light or hardness or planarity) and attempts to partially embody the other pole (darkness or pliability or three-dimensionality). If so, one can then say further that this is an instance of a perennial kind of meaning-making in the arts, wherein a new instance of an artistic practice builds up a sense of historical depth and resonance by creating analogies between itself and prior instances in art, and not only those within the same medium as the newer instance. This would be one instance among a great many in contemporary art wherein meaning does not arise from the practical conception of medium-specificity.

     Perhaps Schwabsky’s struggles to give a coherent and unified account of contemporary painting stem in part from the very nature of the project. In attempting to give such an account, Schwabsky has cited the following features: the work is concerned to explore the tactile and corporeal dimensions of experience; the work must be part of a project whose content is self-invention and contains a representation or allegory of itself. Certainly a great deal more needs to be said about each of these features, and what connects them; but also part of what’s striking about this characterization is that not of the features involves painting in even the minimal sense of intentionally depositing pigment upon a surface. If this is to an account of contemporary painting, and not simply a characterization of importance elements of meaning-making in contemporary art more generally, something needs to be said about how these features are distinctively bound to the practice of painting in some sense. Perhaps Schwabsky does not address this point because there is nothing to be said, that is, perhaps there is no such link between the primordial conception of painting as depositing paint on a surface and core characteristics of contemporary art. If so, one can still investigate contemporary painting, but perhaps with a more modest intent of exploring the qualities of ambitious contemporary art. Schwabsky’s analysis of Schutz’s work would then be a contribution to this more modest project, and to my mind not less illuminating because shorn from the attempt to give a general account of contemporary painting.

References:

John Rapko, Return to Darkness (forthcoming from Universidad de los Andes Press)

Barry Schwabsky, The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting (2019)

On Barry Schwabsky's The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting

     R. G. Collingwood argued that historical understanding requires us to understand what questions the utterances of historical agents were asking. Collingwood thought this point was quite general, so it is not just verbal utterances that must be understood as answers to typically unstated questions, but also historical artifacts such as works of art.  As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has suggested, one particularly valuable way of beginning to reflect on the character of an ideology, a practice, or an institution is to ask oneself what sort of questions aren’t asked within the relevant world of thought. Perhaps one route towards understanding contemporary art is to ask: To what question is contemporary art an answer? And we might ask the question with varying degrees of scope: To what question is this particular work an answer? To what question is contemporary painting an answer? And adjusting for art, we might also follow MacIntyre’s maxim: ‘Ask about the art of your time what it needs you and others not to know’. (MacIntyre, p. 194)

     The recent publication of a collection of the art critic Barry Schwabsky’s The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting provides an opportunity to put these questions to recent art in a determinate way. This volume collects approximately thirty of Schwabsky’s writings on painting from the past 23 years. The presentation is structured by Schwabsky’s three prefaces to editions of Vitamin P, an influential survey of contemporary painting published with markedly different contents in 2002, 2011, and 2016. The preface of the first edition is followed by reviews of shows of abstract paintings, the preface of the second edition by reviews of figurative painting, and the preface of the third by reviews of shows that notably exhibit (according to the volume’s editors) a ‘coexistence’ of figuration and abstraction. The book concludes with the text of a talk on the ontology of art from 2010 and an interview from 2017. Schwabsky’s account of contemporary painting is stated largely in the first preface, with only very partial re-capitulations and elaborations later. The most sustained application of this account with regard to a particular body of painting is given in the third section in a review from 2010 of the work of Dana Schutz. Accordingly, I focus on these two pieces in the following while drawing from elsewhere in the volume as needed to explicate Schwabsky’s account.

     ‘To what question is contemporary painting an answer?’ Schwabsky’s reply is: to none at all! Contemporary painting is not an answer to any question; rather, it is ‘knowingly gratuitous’  (p.10) in the sense that it rejects as a delusion the modernist assumption that ambitious art generally is the answer to a question or the solution to a problem. What questions, what problems? Schwabsky does not say explicitly, but he does contrast the concern the question of what painting is “the fundamental question for Newman, Lucio Fontana, Robert Ryman, and Daniel Buren”) with the more contemporary concern “with how to make a painting.” In the more contemporary painting, “What it is will then emerge from how it is.” (pp.12-13, italics in original) Schwabsky seems to accept a version of Arthur Danto’s that modern art, insofar as it had an intelligible structure organized by the pursuit of a serious aim, was fundamentally an attempt to pose and answer the question ‘What is art?’ So though the late modern painting of Newman et alia posed and offered answers to the question ‘what is painting?’, this self-understanding was a delusion. From our enlightened contemporary standpoint “we can now also see and accept the gratuitousness that lurks even within the most rigorous modernist works as well.” (p. 9)

     The question immediately arises as to why Schwabsky thinks that this modernist self-understanding of serious art as a response to a question is a delusion, rather than, say, a piece of poetics that has been abandoned. He offers nothing explicit on this point, but perhaps something of his answer is contained within his equation of the sense of gratuitousness with the contemporary painters’ emphasis upon style. Schwabsky likens the relationship of contemporary to modernist painting to that of Mannerism to the Renaissance (p. 11). Mannerism arises out of the sense that an immediately prior artistic period is essentially complete (“when a period of clear progress had played itself out”) and artists “seek out the new techniques’ most extreme stylistic and expressive potential.” (ibid.) On the face of it, this formulation contributes nothing to explaining why the earlier period would eventually be revealed as unwittingly marked by gratuitousness; why isn’t Modern art also “a period of clear progress [that] had played itself out”? Perhaps what Schwabsky is gesturing towards is the thought that part of what contemporary painting reveals about modernist painting is that the latter is also highly marked by a concern with style. A needed claim missing from Schwabsky’s formulation, then, would be: a particular style is not a unique answer to a question or the sole possible solution to a problem. So a modernist artist’s claim that a particular style, say Analytic Cubism, is the only compelling response to the challenge posed by Cézanne’s late style would in principle be wholly implausible. Accordingly, the modernist self-understanding of a painting’s alleged non-gratuitousness would be delusory.

      Schwabsky’s central characterization of contemporary painting is better put in stating that whereas the modernist painter understands herself as committed to her style, the contemporary painter calls for ‘flexibility’ (p. 9) in her painting. This flexibility has two aspects: it involves a kind of anti-essentialism (ibid) in refusing to treat whatever is within “the traditional pictorial rectangle” (p. 8) as exhaustive of the focus of the artist’s and viewer’s engagement with the work. Alternatively, one might say that contemporary painting is non- or anti-autonomous. Secondly, contemporary painting involves the recognition of a basic pluralism of viable artistic styles (this point was widely voiced in the 1970’s, and Danto again insisted upon it in the 1990’s). On this latter formulation of Schwabsky’s, the point is not that modernist art was self-deluded, but rather that with regard style contemporary art possesses a relatively heightened self-awareness.

     Schwabsky does insist upon one fundamental continuity between modern and contemporary painting: for both the central concern is the artists’s creation of and carrying out of a project. But what is a project? Schwabsky explicitly struggles with this question, and acknowledges that “‘[p]roject’ might not be the right term; perhaps, following Richard Foreman, better would be the “one thing” or “obsessive theme.”” (p.287) While Schwabsky further notes that the it is of the essence of a project that it be ever incomplete and unfolding (p.289), it is hard to see how this distinguishes artistic projects from my attempts to clean out my basement. Still, something of the distinctive character of projects in contemporary painting emerges in the assertion that “[t]he specific content of contemporary painting is self-invention.” (p. 10) In other words, part of the distinctive content, and so part of the aim of a contemporary artistic project, is for a potential artist to invent (a persona of) an (actual?) artist for themself.

     But how does someone do this in an artistically compelling way? In the forthcoming second part of this piece, I’ll consider Schwabsky’s fullest answer to this question in his account of the work of Dana Schutz, and ask MacIntyre’s question of what Schwabsky’s formulations might be hiding from us.

References:

R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (1939)

--An Essay on Metaphysics (1940)

Arthur Danto, After the End of Art (1997)

Alasdair MacIntyre, “Social structures and their threats to moral agency,” in Ethics and Politics; Selected Essays, Volume 2 (2006)

Barry Schwabsky, The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting (2019)

Vitality in the arts--Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker's Phase in light of Daniel Sterns analysis of forms of vitality

     In the early 1980’s Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker choreographed four pieces to different works by the composer Steve Reich. Collectively titled Fases, these works are classics of recent dance. The piece set to Reich’s ‘Clapping Music’ strikes me as especially fruitful for philosophical reflection. The piece is for two dancers and is built from a vocabulary of swinging arms and bouncing up on the toes of both feet and returning to planted feet. De Keersmaker claims that she arrived at this particular vocabulary through observation of children at play. Both motions are plainly expressive of bodily aliveness, but without carrying any particular meaning. Neither movement carries the sense of what Elizabeth Anscombe called a ‘basic action’, the primitive expression of trying to do and accomplish something. Going briefly up on the toes of both feet is not sufficiently stable to aid one, for example, in reaching something; and the swinging of the arms is isolated from its natural role as part of walking. These two movements are then set into short trains of combinations and variations, with the two dancers at first synchronized and then out of phase (hence the title ‘fase’). The general impression is one of immense liveliness generated by the interaction of the intricate quasi-polyphony of movements and claps. In its use of sub-semantic units, its non-narrative quality, and its sense of working out a set of variations generated through stipulative rules, the piece falls comfortably within the ways of working of a great deal of experimental arts of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. How might then we account for the sense that this is a particularly successful instance of experimental art, a way of working when it often seems that the artist’s ambition is fulfilled largely just in doing something that allegedly has never been done before? 

     One path of reflection suggests itself with the seeming irresistible suggestion that the piece offers an unusually high or intense sense of structured ‘liveliness’. What sort of artistic value is ‘liveliness’? Thinkers from outside the narrow professional focus of art historians and philosophers of art may on occasion offer novel and revelatory perspectives on issues within the professional field. To my mind a recent and surprising instance of this is from Daniel Stern, a psychologist of infants and young children whose earlier work was only known to me through his classic The Interpersonal World of the Infant (1985). In 2010 he published Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology, the Arts, Psychotherapy, and Development. This short book explores ‘vitality’, the sense of being alive without which “the world would be bereft of much of its interest, and human interactions would be digital rather than analogic, whatever that might be like.” (p. 4)

     Vitality is expressed above all in movement. A human movement is not a string of poses; rather a movement embodies a sense of temporality through manifesting a kind of “temporal contour or temporal profile,” (ibid) Temporality in this sense implies a style and rate of flow, and a sense of a beginning and end. In addition, all movement is necessarily spatial and so both characterizes and is of a certain space. As self-directed, movement also conveys a sense of forces behind or within the movement, and so animating it. And finally movement is directional in carrying a sense of purpose to go somewhere. Stern concludes that these five elements—“movement, time, force, space, and intention/directionality” (he oddly refers to them as “five dynamic events linked together”)--are typically bound together in a single Gestalt, a “fundamental dynamic pentad,” the awareness of which gives rise “to the experience of vitality.” (ibid)

          In order to apply this conception of vitality to the arts, Stern supplements this initial characterization with three points. First, he insists that vitality is not a sensation, because there are different routes to the identification and characterization of vitality and sensation. Sensations on his account are ‘modality specific’ (p. 26), that is, sensations are specifically aural, haptic, visual, etc. The sense of vitality by contrast is ‘meta-modal’. The evidence for this is that the characterization of formal features of experienced dynamic pentads is the same across sensorial modalities: one can characterize the vitality of a range of sensations in the same terms and regardless of their particular sensorial modality. One speaks what one hears, sees, touches, etc. in terms of its spatial and temporal elements, their intensities, and its hedonic qualities. The experienced dynamic qualities of vitality, given in a gestalt, are the ‘forms of vitality’. Second, each art form shows forms of vitality “in a relatively purified form—pure in the sense that the dynamic features of a performance [Stern restricts his considerations to the temporal arts of music, dance, theater, and cinema] have usually been amplified, refined, and rehearsed repeatedly.” (p.75) To achieve this, each art form involves a history experimentation with expressive qualities. In the practice of the art form, artists have isolated and thematized particular forms of vitality, and then invented ‘codes’ that ‘mark’ or express them. (p. 76) But also, third, these forms of vitality internal to the practice of a particular art form possess, like forms of vitality more generally in life, a meta-modal quality. Consequently the rich and varied artistic exploration of forms of vitality is particularly well-suited to the collaborative works of contemporary arts such as dance theater, or those that typically use and integrate different, more conceptually primitive art forms and materials, such as cinema’s use of narration, movement, and sound.

     Stern’s actual discussions of the different art forms are quite brief and schematic, but nonetheless stimulating. The most suggestive remarks, to my mind, are those that he makes on dance through a sketch of the method of the analysis of human movement introduced by Warren Lamb in 1965. (pp.87-8). Lamb analyzes human movement into two categories, posture and gesture. Posture involves the mutual adjustment of all parts of the body, whereas gesture isolates some part or parts of the body as bearers of expression. Accordingly posture and gesture can be individually described and their interaction analyzed. The relationships between posture and gesture form a continuum marked at one end by the skilled actions of a well-coordinated athlete to the sense of utter disjointedness between the two. Effects of vitality are generated by varying the relations of discord and concord between the two, and subsuming these relations under further more global structures, such as those provided by music or narrative. Stern gives the simple example of a ballerina who dramatizes her entrance by beginning to move a half-beat ‘late’, so as to have to ‘rush’ in order to catch up to her partner.

      Some ways of applying Stern’s account to the analysis of de Keersmaeker’s piece are evident. Stern notes with regard to the theatrical work of Robert Wilson that an artist can ‘uncouple’ posture and gesture with stunning effect. The progression of Keersmaeker’s piece, from synchronization, through the dancers’ becoming out-of-phase and seemingly enacting alternate paths of variations, to the re-synchronization of their movements towards the end, gives the piece a simple and perceptually clear yet powerful sense of vitality. This combines with a range of mechanisms of isolation and re-combination, as well as the primitive expressions of vitality, especially clapping, jumping, and the swinging of the arms, to give the piece as a whole its unusually intense sense of vitality.

     This analysis is of course only the briefest of sketches, but it perhaps is sufficient to indicate both one way that vitality is an artistic value in mixed-media works involving dance, and how time-based art forms such as dance and music prominently exhibit the value of vitality. But can this kind of account illuminate the value of vitality in other art forms?  Stern explicitly forgoes consideration of literary arts and restricts his consideration of artistic forms of vitality to the time-based arts of dance, theater, and cinema. How might liveliness be embodied the arts less obviously amenable to such an analysis, especially in the ‘static’ arts of architecture and painting? In my next posts I’ll consider accounts from the anthropologist Carlo Severi addressing liveliness in the static arts and from the architect Christopher Alexander considering how the sense of liveliness arises in architecture.

On Samuel Alexander's and Rupert Read's This Civilisation Is Finished

At the conclusion of his recent book Changing the Subject, the philosopher Raymond Geuss has suggested that much of what has seemed to be most alive and thought-provoking about philosophy shall soon be a thing of the past. For Geuss what has seemed of enduring value in philosophy is its capacity to distance itself from the world in which it arises and to reflect upon that world. Philosophy has various routes of reflection, most centrally those of analysis, that is, uncovering its central and often latent ideologies and testing them for cogency and coherence; Socrates opened this route with “his practice of using ratiocination (consisting of dialectical questioning and response) to seek self knowledge and also a knowledge of what human life was best.” (p.295) Another route is that of genealogy as practiced by Nietzsche, that is, excavating something of the conceptual history of a society’s ideologies, beliefs, and assumption through histories of the contingent links in the chain of conceptual, linguistic, and/or practical ancestors of today’s ideologies. And there is the route of practical imagination, “a minority view” that treats our world “as an inherently malleable domain and which construes philosophy as a way of seeking to change the world so as to make it more satisfactory.” (p. 299) Now one indication that philosophy is over is the fact, if it is one, that there are no thinkers in the past half-century who strike many of us as of the stature of thinkers from Socrates through Wittgenstein and Heidegger. But also, as the ways of philosophy depend, as Aristotle suggested, upon leisure and a sense of freedom from practically pressing issues, we recognize that we don’t have such leisure or such freedom; and we imagine that within a generation or two there shall be even less. The reason for this, we imagine, is the coming intensity of climate change, along with a host of other near-certain eventualities: the intensification of the on-going extinction of species, crucially of insects and pollinators; desertification; the likelihood of pandemics; the possibility of nuclear warfare. Once human beings are forced to treat these as the central features of their lives, so Geuss suggests, there will be little interest in reflecting upon, for example, whether Heidegger was right to think that ‘care’ is an ineliminable characteristic of Dasein or whether now a global attitude of ‘letting-be’ is most appropriate for us. (p. 249)

I suspect that Geuss would agree that one topic for philosophy in these times of imminent ecological apocalypse that adopts the minority approach of exercising practical imagination would be the apocalypse itself. While a contemplative approach might use the topic as an occasion to extend say a bit, say, recent thinking on our alleged debt to future generation, a practical approach would address whether there might be ways of individual and collective thinking and individual and collective action that might mitigate our crisis or help us think of ways of coping with climate change and ecological collapse. The most recent major contribution to this imaginative philosophy known to me is this little book This Civilisation is Finished (2019). The book is presented as a discussion between Samuel Alexander (a fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, not the formidable author a hundred years ago of Space, Time, and Deity) and Rupert Read, a philosopher at the University of East Anglia who in the past decade has supplemented his earlier professional focus on Wittgenstein with philosophical, educational, and political activity on the issue of the coming ecological collapse. Most of the book has Alexander in the role of questioner and Read in that of respondent, and so my short summary of the book will be of Read’s views.

At the basis of the book is the diagnosis given in the title: this civilization of ours is finished as a conceptual matter, and the coming ecological catastrophe will finish it as a practical matter. For Read our civilization is characterized firstly by an enormously intricate set of institutions and practices oriented towards technological development and economic profit, and secondly by a set of ideologies propounding two closely connected values, (a) economic and technological growth, and (b) production, especially of commodities. The reason that our civilization, so characterized, is ‘finished’ is that on our best understanding we have reached the limits, and indeed our now going beyond them, of the earth’s capacity to sustain development and profit. The effect of going beyond these limits is that the biological bases of our civilization are collapsing with climate change, desertification and loss of topsoil, destruction of forests, and mass extinctions, especially of insects and pollinators. Because, soberly considered, our civilization as such cannot continue for more than another generation or two, we must think that there are three possible scenarios for human life on earth in the next half century or so: ‘complete collapse, extinction or near-extinction of human life; some sort of new civilization arising from ‘seeds’ that are already present in our current civilization or that we introduce in the few years remaining before collapse; or a radical and rapid transformation of our current civilization into something that allows us to avoid ecological catastrophe. (p. 4; also p. 54 and p. 57) With regard to the first possibility, there is little for the philosophical imagination: one can only wish well those species that, unlike human beings, survive the global ecological collapse. Consideration of the third possibility, that of a rapid, civilization-saving transformation, immediately raises the question of what sort of transformations would be required. Read is at pains to deny the likelihood that the right sort of transformation would involve new kinds and instances of geo-engineering (pp.12-14), or high technology, such as mirrors in space (p. 15). Such transformations would require global implementation for their effectiveness to be so much as barely possible. But the risk, Read thinks, of unintended consequences is enormously high, and so likewise is the use of new kinds of high-technology in the event say the rise of sea levels inundating a nuclear power plant, or of a failure of the electric grid powering mirrors or cooling machinery. So if the third possibility is indeed a possibility, there must be other relevant sorts of transformation. Read thinks that such transformations are governed by “the fundamental logic of precaution. The logic of the ‘via negativa’: do less rather than always more; seek to facilitate resilient ‘anti-fragile’ systems; switch the burden of proof, such that anyone wanting to do something radically new needs to provide evidence that what they propose is safe” (pp. 14-15). Is this not the ethics of the fatalist?

Not so, according to Read. The governing principle of the third possibility is not ‘do nothing’, but rather ‘do less’. If there is a possibility of sustaining our current civilization, it will require a collective renunciation of new technologies, except those meeting the strictest criteria of sustainability, and a collective abandonment of the ideology and associated, deeply-entrenched practices oriented towards economic profit and growth. Here Read reverts to conceptual models familiar since the 1980’s: Duane Elgin’s call for ‘voluntary simplicity’, and Ivan Illich’s proposal for ‘conviviality’ as the most fundamental criterion for evaluating our technologies. Read notes, rightly in my view, that such a collective re-orientation implied in the adoption of such ideals would be and is attractive even if there were no coming ecological catastrophe. “Growthism”, that is, the ideology that ever-increasing economic development and production are somehow central features of the good life for human beings, “tends towards deadliness” (p. 55) under any circumstances. But it seems to me that, on Read’s own account, one surprising implication of this consideration of the third possibility is that it really is not a possibility at all. For Read has characterized our civilization as precisely that which is identified by the ideologies of growth and development, so to abandon those ideologies would be to bring that civilization to an end. If that’s right, then the only possibility for continued human civilization is that suggested in the second possibility, that is, that something new might emerge from ‘seeds’ of the present or near-future. What are these?

The seeds invoked in the second possibility are necessarily local. They must first of all be ‘islands of survivability’, some region that is sustainable even under conditions of global ecological collapse. But also, as models for a future civilization, the must offer the possibility of being scaled up. (p. 72) From what is presented in the book, it is hard to explicate these criteria in any detail, but the seeds surely include the sort of ‘re-wilding,’ advocated prominently by George Monbiot, that would tend to produce ‘anti-fragile’ ecosystems. Likewise it would include the development of towns situated with regions of wild and agricultural land providing sufficient spiritual and nutritional resources to sustain the town’s population.

In terms of practically-oriented philosophical imagination, then, Read’s second and third possibilities collapse into one: our civilization, to the degree that it is bound to ‘growthism’, is indeed finished. If there is something left for philosophy in this area, it will be in large part imagining and reflecting upon new forms of conviviality and re-wilding.

References:

Duane Elgin, Voluntary Simplicity (1981) Raymond Geuss, Changing the Subject (2017) Ivan Illich, Tools For Conviviality (1973) George Monbiot, Feral: rewilding the land, the sea, and human life (2014) Rupert Read and Samuel Alexander, This Civilisation is Finished (2019)

On Cesar Aira's On Contemporary Art

     In the past twenty years I have taught classes at eight different colleges and universities. None of this teaching was the result of my having applied for a position in the standard way, with a cover letter, a statement of teaching philosophy, and letters of recommendation. One happy side effect of this is that I’ve never been formally confronted with the question of what my academic so-called ‘fields of specialization’ are. On informal occasions I tell people that my field is the philosophy of art, with particular attention to contemporary art, where the term ‘field’ just means what I tend to think about in a sustained way and occasionally write about. It’s not at all clear to me how one individuates a non-standard academic sub-field, but one would think that one individuating characteristic is that it has some set of texts that its specialists are expected to master. The existence of a widely accepted set of such texts would testify to the fact that the field has been the object of sustained research and reflection by more than one generation of academics. Now the sub-field of the philosophy of contemporary art, if such there is, certainly contains an enormous number of texts that have documentary value, such as the writings of artists; dozens of thousands of pieces of published art criticism testifying to contemporary tastes and evaluations; catalog essays that indicate how art works are presented and ascribed significance; and writings of academic art historians that express how the works are taken up and understood. But there are only a handful of works that might be thought to give general accounts of contemporary art, its features, its distinctive genres and sub-genres, its characteristic ways of making meaning and failing to do so, its foundational ideologies and myths, and its limits.  My personal list of such works is quite short: the writings of the artists Robert Smithson and William Kentridge, a few works each by the philosophers Arthur Danto, Julianne Rebentisch, and Peter Osborne, and an essay by the philosopher Sherri Irvin. To this list I would now add a little work of great intellectual power and penetration, On Contemporary Art by the Argentinian writer of novellas César Aira.

     The book consists of a single essay by Aira surrounded by brief and inconsequential writings of two other authors. Aira offers a general characterization of central features of contemporary art (he uses the capitalized form ‘Contemporary Art’ to emphasize that he is talking about a distinct period with particular characteristics) almost in passing. The explicit topics are the role of Duchamp and his work as a kind of foundational myth of Contemporary Art, and the peculiar sense of time and history constitutive of Contemporary Art. In the following I’ll attempt a sketch of this immensely intelligent and thought-provoking account, and offer some brief tentative reflections on it.

1.Ontology and Meaning in Contemporary Art: Aira treats Contemporary Art as a distinctive period in the arts that begins around 1970, and continues to the present. Some of his remarks suggest that Contemporary Art is a period of all the arts, but most suggest rather that he thinks of Contemporary Art as distinctive of the visual arts of drawing, painting, and poetry, as well as the various new genres of art that are either primarily visual in a straightforward sense, such as Installation Art, or, like Conceptual Art and Performance Art, that find an institutional base in galleries and museums, the distinctive institutional sites of the visual arts. The clearest indications that he thinks of Contemporary Art as largely the condition of the visual arts are that at two places he considers whether and to what degree the arts of film (p. 34) and literature (pp. 42-5). Like Peter Osborne and others, Aira takes the most distinctive feature of the ontology of a work of Contemporary Art to be its sense of not being exhaustively bound to a particular instantiation in a particular medium or physical basis; as he puts the point, a work of Contemporary Art involves a “migration of the medium, among sculpture, painting, toy, miniature, ceremony, and ritual. The painted picture [for example] at the end is merely the visible testament to the mad solitary machine that moves inside artistic activity.” (p.24) This distributed, ‘post-medium’ condition of Contemporary Artworks is motivated, Aira suggests, by the contemporary omnipresence of photographic works. A photograph is a perfection realization of the much older condition internal to works of visual art, namely, that they can be reproduced. Because of the seeming capacity of a photograph to capture a work of visual art ‘fully’, “precisely [at] the moment of Contemporary Art, it is as if a race started between the work of art and the technical possibility of reproducing it. The work of Contemporary Art flees from technical reproduction to the extent that this advances, and improves. A work becomes a work today to the extent that it remains one step ahead of the possibility of its reproduction . . . “ (p.18) 

     Out of its post-medium condition and this flight from the fantasy of perfect technical reproduction arise the distinctive content and semantics of Contemporary Artworks. The post-medium condition grants the Contemporary Artwork a capaciousness hitherto impossible in the visual arts, allowing a work’s content “to incorporate movement, sound, time in all its alterations, and encyclopedic information.” (p.19) To this Aira adds the point that this incorporation is in part in the service of the aim of dispelling the fantasy that a reproduction can capture everything of artistic significance in a work; the Contemporary Artist “employs her ingenuity and inventiveness to endow her work with one aspect, one point, that remains hidden, even from the most novel and exhaustive technique of reproduction.” (ibid.) In his book Depiction, Michael Podro had made a similar point with regard to the work of Marcel Duchamp (Aira’s account of Duchamp is considered below). On Podro’s account what Duchamp’s work invokes and then defeats is the fantasy that in a work of art there can be a ‘perfect’ fusion of content and form, the ‘what’ and the ‘how’, what the work is about and the work’s manner of presentation of that. The fantasized fusion is forever postponed, a ‘delay in glass’. For Aira what rather cannot be captured is “that constellation of possible stories that glides over the naked photo.” (p.20) Aira calls this element in Contemporary Artworks that escapes photographic capture the ‘not-done’ (e. g. p.38); he thinks that the not-done is an element of all art, but one that is insisted upon and highlighted in Contemporary Art. Likewise, Contemporary Art foregrounds “the ultimate mission of all art” which is “to create new values and put them in circulation.” (p. 27)

2.Duchamp as the mythic founding figure of Contemporary Art: Aira claims that he first sensed something of the conditions and possibilities of Contemporary Art in 1967 when he bought and read the collected writings of Marcel Duchamp. From these writings Aira gleaned that Contemporary Art would consist primarily of “games of intelligence and invention” (p. 15); in its current appearance Contemporary Art is “a euphoric parade of inventiveness.” (p. 44) Now there are many versions of the idea that Duchamp is the founding figure avant la lettre, most commonly the claim, as typical as it is unintelligible, that Duchamp showed that ‘anything can be a work of art’. Though this typical claim cannot survive a moment’s reflection—anyone can name countless things that cannot be a work of art: the inside of a black hole, the contents of my stomach 7 years ago, etc. etc.--, it seems to recur ineluctably whenever someone tries to make sense of some especially minimal alteration of some non-traditional material in a work of Contemporary Art. Aira’s thought is completely free of this absurdity, and he urges instead the thought that it is The Green Box, the writings that preceded and accompanied Duchamp’s invention and construction of ‘The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even’, often referred to as ‘The Large Glass’, that is the ur-work of Contemporary Art. For The Green Box supplements The Large Glass, and so is a kind of non-visible beyond of the material and so perceptible presentation of the work.

      To this version of the founding myth Aira adds a remarkable thought. He notes that part of the legitimating discourse of Contemporary Art includes something like the claim that ‘Duchamp already did everything essential’ (p. 47). So Duchamp’s work opened up the space of free invention with multiple media and materials that is distinctive of Contemporary Art, but at the price of eliminating the possibility of serious or paradigm-altering invention within that space. The works within the field of Contemporary Art manifest nothing less than, but also nothing more than, “the shifting motions of a constellation of partial and provisional exceptionalities.” (p. 48) I was reminded here of a remark by the anthropologist David Graeber, who noted the puzzling phenomenon that human cultures exhibit an ungovernably vast and wild creativity in their myths, but then, through ritual, and institutionalization, chain themselves to a highly restricted range of instantiations and exemplifications of those founding myths. The curious effect of attributing all fundamental creativity to Duchamp is that “Contemporary Art, with all its rich and, for me, fascinating diversity, refutes its own name, because it is, to a large extent, the art of the past: the past of Duchamp’s life.” (p. 46)

3.Temporality and Historicity in Contemporary Art: Aira treats the origins of Contemporary Art as the product of exhaustion and intellectual laziness. It arises at the very end of the 1960’s with “the depletion of the Manet-Cézanne impulse.” (p. 46) More positively, it can be seen as the realization of the telos of modernism (p. 31) ; where modernism had an essentially futural dimension, presenting itself as a trace of the future dawning in the present and sign-posting what the future might look like, Contemporary Art is rather “the smooth and flat realization of the present” (ibid.) that “spreads itself out as a permanent present.” (p. 30) There is much to reflect upon in Aira’s claim, but one intriguing implication of it allows him to make sense of a historically peculiar feature of Contemporary Art, the odd irrelevance of taste among its artists, critics, advocates, and detractors. For taste is something that is as a conceptual matter something that is formed over time; one develops a taste, say, for a certain genre of music of one’s late adolescence, and this formed taste has something of a durable character. Later styles are liked and disliked, enjoyed or rejected, partly in terms of whether they are of a piece with the values of those works that exemplified the previously formed taste. Aira suggests that taste then requires a historical sense, with at least some minimal structure of artistic change in terms of stages. But Contemporary Art lacks stages, at least as structural features. The place of taste in previous art is in Contemporary Art occupied by wholesale acceptance or wholesale rejection: “in Contemporary Art you’re either in or out.” (p. 32) Aira interestingly notes that there is a characteristic figure ‘in’ Contemporary Art, its ‘militant Enemy’ (p. 35), who rages against its silliness, lack of propriety, abandonment of skill, etc. etc. But what one does not see is the figure who thinks that the only valuable aspect of Contemporary Art is, say, the appropriation works of the 1980’s, or the Relational Art of the 1990’s.

4. A remark by way of conclusion: It is beyond the scope of this blog piece to offer a full consideration of Aira’s thought-provoking account; I have attempted an account of central features of Contemporary Art in two little books whose points I won’t attempt to so much as sketch here. But I note that nothing in my understanding of Contemporary Art has led me to grant to Duchamp anything like the central role that Aira assigns him. Neither does Duchamp’s work play any significant role in the thought of Robert Smithson, who dismissed Duchamp’s quasi-aristocratic disdain for work and materiality, nor in the thought of William Kentridge, who proceeds as if Duchamp had never existed, and instead finds orientation from figures like Dziga Vertov, Brecht, and Max Beckmann. As Aira himself makes clear, the conceptual cost of treating Duchamp as ‘having already done everything’ is perhaps to deprive oneself of the possibility of finding instances of paradigm-shifts, developing traditions, or indeed of a kind of artwork that draws upon the cultural needs and existential depths of contemporary people. Perhaps. Or perhaps Aira is right, and the suspicion immediately arises that this indicates that there are no such needs and depths . . .

References:

César Aira (2018, originally in Spanish in 2010), On Contemporary Art

Arthur Danto (1998), After the End of Art

Sherri Irvin (2005), “The Artist’s Sanction in Contemporary Art”

William Kentridge (2014), Six Drawing Lessons

Peter Osborne (2013), Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art

Michael Podro (1998), Depiction

John Rapko (2014), Logro, Fracaso, Aspíration: Tres Intentos de Entender el Arte Contemporáneo

John Rapko (forthcoming in Spanish in 2020), Return to Darkness

Julianne Rebentisch (2012), Aesthetics of Installation Art

Julianne Rebentisch (2013), Gegenwarts Kunst zur Einführung

Robert Smithson (1996), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings

Do the Diagnoses Conflict? Reflections on Badiou and Sluga on Trump

     In my previous two blog posts I tried, first, to summarize Alain Badiou’s new book Trump, which consists of two lectures delivered in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s electoral victory in 2016; second, as a contribution to the evaluation of Badiou’s analysis, to present the most powerful alternative philosophical account of Trump known to me, namely, a lecture by Hans Sluga delivered in earlier 2017, and subsequently published on his blog. Both philosophers take broadly what Sluga has called a ‘diagnostic’ approach, wherein (a) Trump is treated as a symptom of broader economic, cultural, and even metaphysical processes and conceptions; then (b) the explanatorily relevant background is sketched; and, as Sluga puts it in his book Politics and the Search for the Common Good ((2014), p. 25), (c) the diagnostician assumes “the unity of theory and practice”, and so at the very least rejects theorizing that lacks some practical import. Sluga further notes that the practice of philosophical diagnosis “does not by any means guarantee the correctness of its outcomes.” (p.37) And along with the question of the correctness of each of the two accounts taken individually, one wonders whether both accounts could simultaneously be ‘correct’. Or is ‘correctness’ even the most important criterion for evaluating such accounts? One might rather think that perhaps fruitfulness in indicating and evaluating courses of potentially transformative political action is a more pressing concern for such accounts.

     One way to approach these questions is to consider first what Badiou’s and Sluga’s diagnoses share, and then to ask where and why they differ. Their most salient shared characteristic is the claim that our contemporary situation is characterized by ‘disorientation’. What is this? Neither philosopher thinks that is either possible or desirable to imagine that someone can have, as part of one’s cognitive repertoire, a comprehensive theory of how the world is. Now one paradigm or ideal type of having an orientation or being oriented would surely be something of the late Medieval Christian’s sense of life. The Christian is born into a world that offers the person a secure sense of place, not primarily as the product of contingencies of birth as so-and-so’s son or daughter, but as a being whose life has a certain structure and trajectory. The Christian aims for salvation, and life presents itself as a series of challenges and tests leading or blocking access to the goal. The Christian’s orientation resembles to that extent the formula for his happiness that Nietzsche gives in Twilight of the Idols: “A yes, a no, a straight line, and a goal.” Although the Christian’s religious kind of orientation cannot be the counter to our contemporary disorientation, still the term ‘orientation’ does suggest some kind of generality. But if I’m thirsty, see a water fountain, and walk towards it, I am not ‘oriented’ in the relevant sense, I am not oriented in the relevant sense, even though the intelligibility of my action presupposes some ‘general’ knowledge of thirst, water, fountains, etc. Perhaps one minimal sense of orientation would be satisfied if I operated with an implicit map of water sources. So I could pass my days and, when thirsty, have a sense of where to go to get water. ‘Orientation’, then, includes a practical dimension: I must have a sense of where I am (otherwise the map is useless), what sorts of needs, wants, and/or desires I wish to satisfy, and what sort of paths and obstacles there are to attaining my goal.

      ‘Orientation’, then, involves at least three elements. First, the ‘oriented’ person must grasp herself under some conception that marks her needs, interests, desires, and/or projects. Second, an ‘oriented’ person must grasp herself as aiming at something more general than simply satisfying her needs, desires, etc. This generality might be thought of as single or as some set of values and/or ideals. These values and ideals are grasped by the person as motivating: they are not values and ideals for just anyone, but for that person, and as such they are prima facie attractive. Third, an ‘oriented’ person would have some sense of how to go about exemplifying those values and/or ideals in her actions and in the products of her actions. Additionally, the whole containing these elements must have a degree of stability, for if one or more of the elements fluctuated rapidly and unpredictability the sense of orientation would be self-undermining; the person might no sooner undertake the realization of some value when the value changes, or the person changes so as to no longer find the value attractive, or no route towards realization is on view.

     Both Badiou and Sluga aim to counter disorientation with invention in the service of re-orientation. For Badiou “the brutality and the blind violence of contemporary capitalism” (p.45; and similarly at p.15) are evident. For the limited purposes of a diagnostic account of Trump the values and ideals that provide points of orientation are those of universality and equality. Of course it is possible to live, like Nietzsche’s last man, without these; life then would consist of endless consumerist lurching towards whatever products showed up on one’s horizon. The ‘communist hypothesis’ of orientation towards universality and equality is just that, a hypothesis, but the point of which is to generate at least the possibility that one’s individual and collective life has some point and direction. Badiou takes up the more activist interpretation of Marx’s dictum for philosophy: the point of philosophy is to change the world, or at least to transform itself into a kind of reflective activity in the service of such change. Sluga, by contrast, takes a less activist stance towards the activity of philosophy: it is not that philosophical activity is in the service of some determinate direction of change, but is rather more an activity like Foucault’s quasi-Kantian historical ontology. Such philosophy has a two-fold aim: to maintain the sense of the present as a contingent product of various historical processes; but also to provide a map of possible routes out of the miseries and seeming-aporias of the present. As Sluga puts it (2014, p.242): “a map does not tell us how we must travel; it does not give us general rules for traveling; it does not give us rules at all; but it shows possibilities; tells us where we can and cannot go; . . . it is a practical guide to help us with our practical needs.” For Sluga the aim of diagnostic political philosophy is not to provide a Badiou-esque action-orienting Idea, but rather to provide such a map.

     If something like this is right, then it seems plausible to think further that there is no deep inconsistency between the two accounts. Sluga could treat Badiou’s account as a proposal for one possible route out of the present, and evaluate it accordingly. Likely Sluga would consider Badiou’s inventions insufficiently attentive to the ways in which our present age is that of “high technology” (Sluga (2014), pp. 205-225). Badiou could grant much of Sluga’s analyses and diagnoses, but would likely think that Sluga has granted too much to Nietzsche’s account of nihilism: the post-Nietzschean lives of Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Brecht, C. L. R. James, and countless others show that our nihilistic condition has not wholly blocked the possibility of treating (some) values as fixed and action-orienting.—I am grateful to both philosophers for their contributions to this topic and advancing our reflection on and understanding of the political present.

An Alternative to Badiou? Hans Sluga on Trump as a Political Phenomenon

      In my previous post I outlined three ways in which political philosophy might relate to contemporary events, the Hegelian, the Kantian (as interpreted by Foucault), and a more activist and diagnostic approach suggested by Marx. Alain Badiou’s recent lectures on Trump give one version of the diagnostic approach. In this post I’ll consider an alternative diagnostic approach to Trump outlined by the political philosopher Hans Sluga, the author of what is to my mind the most sophisticated study of the diagnostic approach in political philosophy, his book Politics and the Search for the Common Good (2014).  

     In 2017, less than four months after Badiou’s lectures, Sluga delivered a lecture, since published on his blog, addressing Trump as a political phenomenon (http://www.truthandpower.com/blog/blog/diagnosing-donald-trump/). In marked contrast to Badiou, Sluga does not so much as mention capitalism as a background to Trump, and with only a brief discussion likewise dismisses the thought that neo-liberalism is explanatorily relevant. Whereas Badiou gives only a brief description of Trump’s character as “an incoherent billionaire,” Sluga treats Trump’s character as a crucial indicator. After giving an exuberant description of Trump’s formidably repellant character (“a man fearful of contamination, of the danger that lurks in every handshake, terrified by stairs and inclines. . . full of bonhomie at one moment, snarling like a raccoon at the next,” etc.), Sluga identifies Trump as fundamentally a plutocrat, and with four characteristics: (a) he’s a multi-billionaire; (b) “he is in essence a self-made man”; (c) he is a real-estate developer; and (d) he uses his money to gain political influence. The philosophically key features are (c) and (d), which mark him as a representative of plutocracy understood as a political system wherein politics and business are fully integrated. This characterization distinguishes, so Sluga argues, Trumpian plutocracy from neo-liberalism; both integrate and unify the political realm and the economic realm, but neo-liberalism aims simply to eliminate governmental regulations so that business might pursue its self-dictated courses, whereas plutocracy aims to mutually adjust the political and the economic so as to maximally integrate them. And startlingly Sluga explicitly follows Plato and Aristotle in insisting that plutocracy, despite its evident dangers, is not the worst form of government. Still, Sluga acknowledges that the historically distinctive characteristic of contemporary plutocracy is its background against the current “global accumulation of wealth.”

       Like Badiou, Sluga thinks the condition of the possibility of the emergence of Trump as a political phenomenon is a kind of cultural disorientation. But whereas Badiou thinks that disorientation arises directly as a result of the loss of the communist ideal and so the loss of any admirable counter-ideal to capitalism, Sluga, following Nietzsche, thinks that our contemporary disorientation is the most basic symptom of our nihilism. And like Nietzsche in the 1880’s, Sluga thinks that our nihilism is ‘incomplete’ in the sense that we as a civilization have still not come to grips with this basic phenomenon and/or we are not suffering from an anomie through holding no values whatsoever. Nihilism for Nietzsche and Sluga is first of all a state wherein ‘the highest values de-value themselves’, so, while we still hold values, we have no way of ranking them, and so no reason to hold onto one rather than another. Consequently all values become phenomena of fashion and are afflicted with a kind of triviality. Secondly, and it seems to me, differing from Nietzsche, Sluga thinks that contemporary nihilism is characterized by the presumption of a reduction of all phenomena to tools of power. Our world of incomplete nihilism is a spectacle of ever-changing brutalisms. This gives Trump his fullest characterization as a philosophical phenomenon: he is a nihilistic plutocrat.

     Sluga, then, gives a diagnostic account that is markedly different from Badiou’s, and it is by no means obvious whether the accounts are compatible, and, if not, which is to be preferred. I shall turn to an evaluation of the two accounts in my next blog post.

Alain Badiou on Trump

     There are at least two great images of how philosophical reflection relates to its contemporaneous world. Hegel proclaimed that ‘philosophy is its time comprehended in thought’, but that this comprehension was necessarily reflective and retrospective. Philosophy grasped its current moment as the culmination of a process of conceptual development; so in philosophy one can at most claim to have reconstructed and analyzed how things are up to the present. On this account there can be no futural dimension to philosophy; philosophers are not in the business of prediction, but rather of understanding. This way of understanding the legitimate aim of philosophical activity carries a related though conceptually distinct claim: philosophical reflection is not action-oriented; it’s aim is not to provide advice on how what ought to act in the contemporary world.

     A different image is provided by a Kant’s suggestion in the essay “What is Enlightenment?”, and as influentially interpreted by Michel Foucault, that a legitimate aim of philosophy is to reflect on the present so as to grasp, in Foucault’s phrasing, “the historical ontology of the present.” The goal of such reflection is to grasp the present as something contingent, and so as something that need not be; if the present is something that results from the interaction of various contingent social, political, cultural, etc. processes, we can immediately infer that had such processes not taken the particular courses they did, we in the contemporary world would be different, and that there was nothing necessary about the particular courses that did in fact occur. Secondly we might then think of the present not in the Hegelian manner as something complete and completed, but as something at least potentially open to alteration and reconstruction. So the future is a task, but philosophy still cannot offer any guidance in how it might be changed, and only rather the assurance that nothing necessary blocks it from changing and being changed.

     A third image haunts philosophical reflection: Karl Marx’s final thesis on Feuerbach, that “philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world; the point however is to change it.” Even on the assumptions that one is attempting to unify one’s theory and one’s practice, and that one agrees that the point of one’s efforts is in part to change the world, the thesis suggests two emphases that are prima facie in tension: if the emphasis is placed upon changing the world through action, the thesis suggests that one abandon philosophy for political activity. But if the emphasis is upon a course of reflection aiming to contribute to world-changing activity, then one’s conception of philosophy shifts, from attempting to understand the world as it is, to a least including in one’s philosophizing some sense of how the world should be changed, and moreover what are the possible actions and their conditions that might contribute to the sought for change; additionally one will want to ask what are the criteria relevant to evaluating proposed courses of action.

     Already some distinguished contemporary philosophers have attempted a philosophical account of the figure and presidency of Donald Trump. Alain Badiou’s little book on Trump was published earlier this year. The book consists of two lectures on Trump, one initially delivered only two days after his election as president, the other just two weeks later. It’s a tribute to Badiou’s long-pondered political philosophy and his analytic powers that the lectures remain pointed and stimulating nearly three years later. Badiou’s thought generally is marked by an enthusiastic and remarkably clear-sighted pursuit of the activist interpretation of philosophy suggested by Marx’s thesis. I will not attempt here even to sketch Badiou’s general philosophy and the role of politics within it, other than to say that Badiou considers politics to be one of the central ways in which people pursue the events that orient meaningful human action. Examples of such events for Badiou would be such things as the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia or the collapse of the Soviet Union. Can the election of Trump be treated as such a fundamental orienting event? If not, what if anything does the phenomenon of Trump offer to political philosophy?

     Badiou’s reflections begin with a diagnosis: the most fundamental political feature of our time is the seeming triumph of globalized capitalism. Its triumph is a miserable one: few people are so blinkered as to think such a formidably destructive system, and one that has produced the greatest unequal distribution of human wealth in history, represents any fulfillment of worthwhile human capacities and aspirations. Rather, our contemporary plight is that we can’t imagine an alternative to it. Analogously to Winston Churchill’s famous characterization of democracy, capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the other ones. Consequently, Badiou says in the first lecture (p.12), “this global totality [of capitalism] has effects on the various peoples [of the world], effects of disorientation. Nobody can conceive clearly what a life with a meaningful direction might look like or what would be a strategic vision of the future of humanity.” Badiou then seems to suggest that people nonetheless seek some way out of the nightmarish stasis of global capitalism, and that this results in “the appearance of a new kind of activist, who defends violent and demagogic proposals and who seems more and more to take as his model gangsters or mafias, rather than trained bourgeois politicians.” The most recent of these thugs is “Trump, the vulgar and incoherent billionaire.” (ibid)

     The task of an action-oriented political philosophy is then two-fold: first (and this is the aspect that occupies much of Badiou’s discussion), we need to “create a real contradiction” (p.23) or, in the second lecture, “invent” (p.46) an alternative. A genuine alternative must be something that can in principle attract all people, induce aspirations for action, and provide criteria for judging proposals. The alternative must be a principle or idea of orientation. Such an alternative is given by what Badiou calls ‘communist orientation’, “whose central point is the making in-common (hence the world “communism”) of everything concerning the great processes of production and exchange.” (p.24)

     Further, Badiou thinks that by ‘inventing’ the communist orientation we can place Trump philosophically. Badiou offers the following schema (p.35):

     On this account, ‘communism’ represents the aspiration towards universality and equality. The field of ‘acceptable’ political views in the United States is split between the dismal Democratic Party and the demented Republicans. The opposite pole to communism is ‘fascism’, an aspiration towards thorough-going political and cultural identitarianism and hierarchy. So Trump and Bernie Sanders represent the ‘real contradiction’ in American political life. Sanders is poised between the mediocre consensus of the Democrats and a more radical aspiration beyond capitalism; Trump is likewise poised between the deranged consensus of the Republicans and a more extreme aspiration towards hierarchy and ethnic and nationalist idenitarianism.

      Has Badiou thereby grasped the significance of Trump for political philosophy? In my next post I’ll consider a different diagnosis offered by the philosopher Hans Sluga.

The Tears of Cate White

“The tears stream down my cheeks from my unblinking eyes. What makes me weep so? From time to time. There is nothing saddening here. Perhaps it is liquefied brain. Past happiness in any case has clean gone from my memory, assuming it was ever there. If I accomplish other natural functions it is unawares. Nothing ever troubles me. And yet I am troubled.”—Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953/1958)

     I’ve never known anyone who admits to liking the artworld, that loosely connected, open set of institutions, their patrons and cadres and enthusiasts. One historically unprecedented kind of certificate of inclusion in that world that circulates among and connects the galleries and gallerists, museums and curators, art schools and teachers, collectors and their collections, critics and publicists, is the artist’s statement, wherein the artist attempts to give her audience a glimpse of her concerns, poetics, and manner of working. Having written on contemporary art for 30 years and having taught at art schools for half of that time, I have skimmed, though certainly not read, perhaps a thousand of such documents. With the rarest of exceptions, the artist’s statement centrally exhibits two features: (1) The artist offers a diagnosis of the contemporary world (e.g. ‘We live in a media-saturated world where clicks and likes are more important than content’); (2) The artist claims that her work adopts and manifests a critical attitude that gains its content and point in relation to this diagnosis (e.g. ‘My work mimics the process of attention-grabbing in order to highlight its effects while undermining the way the media colonize consciousness so as to present an alternative vision’). The artist’s statement, then, embodies a kind of taken-for-granted model of seriousness in contemporary art: diagnosis + critical attitude. The artistic practice of the artist’s statements is a poetics of the accredited theme and appropriate attitude. One wonders whether a large part of the leaden seriousness and unrelieved tediousness of so much art produced by teachers in art schools and universities stems from the artists taking this format seriously and actually making works whose point is exhausted in illustrating their statements.

     What are the alternatives to such art? Consider the painter Cate White’s recent show at the Mills College Art Museum. A few dozen works are exhibited, mostly paintings, but also drawings, sculptures, a room of videos of her podcasts, and some unclassifiable constructions. One way to gain a sense of White’s extraordinary artistic achievement is to consider how the poetics exhibited here could not be well captured in the stereotypical model of an artist’s statement. The diagnosis claims to get at something central to contemporary life, and this central characteristic is embodied in our society’s practices, institutions, and/or socially-sanctioned attitudes; and then the characteristic is submitted to critique. A different poetics would focus not on central characteristics, but would instead begin by asking questions like: What aspects of life are left out of the dominant culture? What questions are taboo, and may not be asked on pain of exclusion? A range of thinkers, including Sigmund Freud, the anthropologist Mary Douglas, the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács, and the contemporary neo-Thomist philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre have urged that cultural systems are revealed, and criticism brought to bear more pointedly by considering the margins and beyond, and not the center.

     I have been thinking about White’s show daily since first seeing it six weeks and two further viewings ago. I hope to write about it at much greater length, but for a short blog post, let’s consider it in relation to three of the central characteristics of Samuel Beckett’s poetics after World War II: (a) what Beckett called a ‘syntax of weakness’, something that renounces triumphalism in art, that is, that refuses to treat the artistic medium (for Beckett language, for White paint) as already possessing a rich history of achievement from which the artist can gain some secure orientation; instead what the artist begins with ‘the dead things’ that ‘make a pretty sum’: these are (b) clichés—on pain of unintelligibility, one must start with them, there is nothing else, and besides one has nothing to say, no wisdom to offer, and no medium with which to convey it; the purgatorial path of making works out of clichés is (c) submitting them to ‘black humor’. The humor of the artist statement is invariably that of those who think well of themselves, who use light-heartedness or sarcasm to announce their ease in the world. But black humor, as André Breton characterized it in 1939, is a ‘superior revolt of the mind’ whose mortal enemies are whimsy and sentimentality.

      The master cliché of White’s show is tears, those that fall like rain, the ones that I’m forced to cry, a veritable river of them, our tears of sorrow and rage and joy. Tears flow in steady streams in paintings, on sculptures, and from work to wall. The tears are nothing to cry about: they flow continuously, without spasms or sobs, and might show up as the spray from a lawn sprinkler or as water streaming from girls who’ve just been swimming.

     Just as Beckett’s Molly notes about his genitals, White’s tears are nothing to write home about, the clichéd expression of a clichéd content, but worthy of noting all the same.

Martin Hägglund's This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom--A Critical Notice

     Having completed the spiritually-corroding action of submitting final grades, I have turned to the uplifting practice of catching up with my reading. Recently I happened upon and quickly read Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (2019). It was quite different from what I had thought the title promised. Even an initial rapid read-through indicates that it is a work of genius and astonishing originality. I offer a brief summary in hopes that my intellectual and spiritual friends will read it:

     Hägglund attempts to renew the project of the young Karl Marx: to submit everything that exists to ruthless criticism in the service of a distinctively modern project of realizing human freedom. Like the young Marx, Hägglund thinks that the project of criticism has two principle targets: religion and politics. Hägglund attempts to show that the modern attempts to actualize the most typical religious and political conceptions--that is, for people to adopt such conceptions as part of their core identities, to embody these conceptions in their institutions, and to live their lives in light of criteria whose home is in these conceptions—are self-undermining. By ‘self-undermining’ Hägglund means that in practice such conceptions are neither stable nor fully intelligible to the people attempting to live their lives in light of these conceptions.

      In contrast to these unstable and unintelligible conceptions, Hägglund offers (a) a philosophical anthropology, (b) a conception of ‘spiritual freedom’ that takes as central the main features of the philosophical anthropology, and (c) a conception of ‘democratic socialism’ that overcomes the self-undermining modern notion of a capitalist democracy and replaces its central value, namely that of increasing production, with one appropriate to spiritual freedom, namely increasing ‘socially available free time’.

     In developing his alternative conceptions Hägglund ranges widely over nearly 400 pages, with lengthy discussions in particular of Kierkegaard, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, Buddhism, Augustine, Hegel and Marx, and Martin Luther King Jr. Briefly and summarily put, (a) his philosophical anthropology asserts that we human beings are fundamentally and ineliminably finite beings, which means that we are fragile, caring, and in need of care. Because we are finite, we are valuing beings: things matter to us in varying ways and degrees because we do not have an infinite amount of time to lead our lives. Further and correlatively, the idea that an essential part of ourselves is non-finite or immortal undermines the very possibility of valuing anything, as well as the possibility of our having a practical identity of ourselves. This latter thought is the core of Hägglund’s critique of religious conceptions.

     (b) ‘Spiritual freedom’ consists in the active living of one’s practical identities. A practical identity is minimally a social role (e.g.. being a father, a lover, an intellectual) with which one identifies. ‘Active living’ minimally involves being able to appropriate one’s identities, to feel at home in them, and to reflect upon, question, and possibly alter them in the course of living them. ‘Active living’ then is a practical dimension of life which also necessarily involves a proto-theoretical element.

     (c) The historically possible form of social and political life that maximizes human beings’ possibilities of living in spiritual freedom is democratic socialism. Rightly understood, Marx claimed that democratic socialism is the political form that arises from the overcoming of capitalism. Hägglund follows the line of thinking about Marx that insists that Marx did not hold the so-called labor theory of value, wherein value arises strictly from the quantity of labor that is put into a product. Rather, (according to Hägglund) Marx held that under the conditions of capitalism value appears to arise in accordance with the mechanism of the labor theory of value. Thus overcoming capitalism fundamentally involves replacing the criterion of value as labor with a criterion appropriate to a post-capitalism democratic socialism. This latter criterion of value would be socially available free time; that is, ‘things’ in the broadest sense would be valuable to the degree that they provide the free time required for the living of a life of spiritual freedom.

      I would hope that this summary of Hägglund’s central points indicates something of the enormous interest of his book. All of the points mentioned are developed at considerable length, with nuance and qualification. Another aspect of the book that is of great intellectual interest is Hägglund’s critiques of thinkers from Adorno to Thomas Piketty and Naomi Klein as insufficiently radical in their criticisms of capitalism. Particularly with regard to the latter most recent thinkers, Hägglund shows that because they lack a positive conception of (spiritual) freedom and an articulate conception of capitalism, they silently assume the latest form of capitalism, that is to say, neoliberal capitalism, is definitive of capitalism, and so they offer in essence capitalism plus redistribution as the ‘progressive’ alternative to capitalism. But this, Hägglund argues, is self-undermining in part because it fails to see how capitalism so much as produces the value that is then to be re-distributed.  I look forward to returning to the book at the end of the summer, as well as to its sequel whose publication is promised for August.

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.