Expression in Contemporary Art, Part 4: Theodor Adorno, Nam June Paik, Carol Trindade

Expression in Contemporary, Part 4:

In the previous posting, I introduced two pieces of evidence that might be cited in support of the claim that by around 1960 something of the self-evident character of the expressivist theory in the visual arts had been lost, and with that loss something of the intelligibility of the appeal of expression in the arts generally. For on the expressivist theory part of the content, and indeed the distinctively artistic content, of an artwork was that the work embodied an expression of the artist’s subjectivity, usually her mental life, and specifically her feelings, emotions, and moods. If one additionally adopts something like the views of the philosopher of art Arthur Danto, that an artist’s individual style expresses her unique point-of-view on the world, and that part of the value of the arts generally is that they provide us, the viewers and listeners, with the opportunity to experience, understand, and appreciate the world from others’ points of view, then the attractiveness and durability of the expressivist view becomes clear: a work of art expresses the artist’s sensibility, and fulfilling this function is the point and value of the arts.

     But, as I’ve suggested, there is little plausibility in the expressivist theory, at least in its basic form as stated from Wordsworth to Tolstoy, and, as I’ve hinted, there is little in contemporary visual arts to suggest that the theory is part of the working ideology of artists, even in the theory’s modified and most sophisticated forms. In this final part of the lecture I’ll try to convey of feel the roles that expression plays in contemporary art through a brief consideration of the work of one of the founding contemporary artists, Nam June Paik, as well as a current practitioner, the dance-theater artist Carol Trindade. Now one indication of how the conception of expression shifts from its characteristic employment in modern art to its use in contemporary art might be seen in an influential and controversial essay by the philosopher Theodor Adorno from 1955 entitled ‘The Aging of the New Music’. This essay was originally a lecture given in a critical, even polemical, attempt to understand and intervene in the practice of experimental music in Europe as it was presented and developed at yearly meetings at Darmstadt in West Germany. Adorno was particularly concerned to analyze and attack what he viewed as an artistically and politically naïve attempt by composers to eliminate the appeal to subjectivity in musical composition, in favor of two characteristics of composition and its motivating ideologies. First, he was opposed to the idea that music composition could and should be understood as the application of procedures and techniques prior to the activity of composition. On that ideology, once the composer had decided upon certain materials and certain procedures for transforming those materials, the rest of the composition was a quasi-mechanical application. Second, this technicist conception of musical composition was partly motivated by the aim to eliminate the appeal to the composer’s sensibility in favor of displaying the non-intentional expressiveness of the materials, that is, the sounds, themselves. Against this conception Adorno urged: “It is not expression as such that must be exorcised from music . . . rather the element of transfiguration, the ideological element of expression, has grown threadbare.” So rather than reject (subjective) expression as such, what is needed “is for expression to win back the density of experience.” (p. 191)

     What might it mean to ‘win back the density of experience’? My suggestion here is that we can see in major aspects of contemporary art something of the enriched expression Adorno called for, and with it part of the working out of the consequences of rejecting the expressivist theory. Among many possible examples, let’s consider one of the founding figures of contemporary art, Nam June Paik, who is widely credited with introducing the use of television as an artistic medium, as well as helping found video as an art kind, both starting in the mid-1960s. I’d like consider though the inauguration of his poetics from the late 1950s through the early 1960s. Born in 1934, Paik had gone to West Germany in the mid-1950s to study advanced musical composition and wrote a dissertation on the composer Arnold Schoenberg. In 1958 he heard music and lectures by the composer John Cage, and thereafter he considered this the founding event of his artistic practice. By that time Cage had developed techniques for using chance operations in musical composition, as well as using what he called ‘indeterminacy’, wherein the composer stipulates a certain situation for performance, such as length of time of a piece, the instruments to be used, and something of the manner in which they shall be played, but leaves large aspects of the piece unscripted; in an indeterminate piece a great deal is left to the performers, and so successive performances of the same piece might not be audibly recognizable as such. As described in Martin Iddon’s Music at Darmstadt, Paik was struck by a number of aspects of Cage’s work. He asked Cage how he chose among different chance realizations of certain procedures, that is, what sort of criteria Cage might use to determine relatively successful and unsuccessful outcomes of the operations. Cage replied that it didn’t matter which ones were used. Paik took this to mean, as he later said, that such an art pursued in such a manner would be ‘always young’. Arthur Danto cites a remark suggestive of a similar though more general diagnosis was made by the artist Dick Higgins, who was part of the artistic movement Fluxus that Paik also aligned himself with a few years later, and other of whose members had been members of Cage’s composition seminar in New York City in the late 1950s: “back when the world was young—that is around the year 1958.” (Danto 2005, p. 334)  Paik conceptualized his subsequent work as a kind of ‘post-music’. Paik’s work clustered around three foci: 1. Non-traditional performative works, notably including his contribution to Karl-Heinz Stockhausen’s theater-happening Originale, wherein Paik buttoned and unbuttoned his jacket; a performance that included Paik destroying a piano and cutting off the tie of John Cage, who was sitting unawares in the audience; and a number of erotic pieces with the cellist Charlotte Moorman. 2. Works that involved the manipulation of televisions and television screens. 3. Works for video. A typical instance of Paik’s  performative visual ‘post-music’ was Zen for Head (1962), wherein Paik followed the instructions of a Fluxus piece by the composer LaMonte Young by dipping his hair into a bowl of ink and dragging it the length of a long scroll of paper. For the restricted concerns of this lecture I only note that while these works seem immediately expressive of an avant-gardist attitude in their rejection of traditional artistic skills, media, and genres, as well as in their air of aggression, there is nothing in them that encourages the thought that they are expressions of Paik’s mental states, moods, emotions, or feelings; rather they aim in by-passing inherited modes to address direct the audience and induce non-habitual and accordingly non-authorized, and so relatively heightened responses. As Adorno had put it with regard to contemporaneous music, the point seems to be play with conventions in the service of unforeseeable rhetorical effects, a way, as Paik would say, of keeping the arts young.

     To bring this lecture to a close, let’s briefly consider a very recent instance of contemporary art that displays, so I suggest, a distinctively contemporary concern with heightened expressiveness while eliminating any trace of an appeal to the artist’s emotional self prior to the actual work. Carol Trindade is a young (born in 1999) theater artist whose work so far consists of primarily of short improvised performances that are filmed and posted on Instagram and Facebook. She claims as her primary artistic sources the post-World War II Japanese art of butoh, the ‘dance of darkness’, and the dance theater of Pina Bausch; both of these in turn have common artistic sources in the work and thought of Rudolf Laban and the German Expressionist dancer and choreographer Mary Wigman.  Trindade’s most ambitious piece so far is ‘Intense Butoh’ (2020), an astonishing 25-minute performance of facial movements. These movements are mostly suggestive of extreme states, with slow shifts of the mouth, eyes, and eyebrows, and physiognomic markers of loss of control including drooling and weeping. Yet, unexpectedly, at no moment do these movements seem to coalesce into recognizable expressions of emotional states of say grief, fear, or ecstasy. Put negatively, what we are offered is not expression but rather the destruction of expression and its conventions; put positively, what seems revealed is the sub-personal source of expression, a seething reservoir of proto-expressive elements. What the philosopher of action Carla Bagnoli has said of butoh generally applies also to Trindade’s eclectic adaptation of it: “butō improvisation does not count on the dancer as a pre-defined subject existing prior to and independently of her performance. In contrast to these interpretations, I hold that there are normative criteria for butō improvisation, which govern its explorative and generative functions by a training based on unselfing. This model turns away from the rhetoric of spontaneous free movements and the search for individual authenticity. It advocates for a model of intentional agency that it is not mediated by (individual or joint) intentions, but aspires to generate a community by sharing the experience of a living emotional body.” I would suggest that this is part of the achievement of contemporary visual art more generally: to recover expressiveness from the expressivist theory.

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References:

Theodor Adorno, ‘The Aging of the New Music’ (1955) in Essays on Music (2002)

Carla Bagnoli, ‘The Springs of Action in Buto Improvisation’ in The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Improvisation in the Arts (2021)

John Cage, Silence (1961)

Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981)

----‘The World as Warehouse: Fluxus and Philosophy’ (2001) in Unnatural Wonders (2005)

Edith Decker-Phillips, Paik Video (1998)

Martin Iddon, New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhause, Cage, and Boulez (2013)

Nam June Paik, We Are in Open Circuits: Writings by Nam June Paik (2019)

Expression in Contemporary Art, Part 3: Warhol, Bowling, Wollheim--Expression Around 1960

     In the previously posted two parts of this piece, I urged two principal points with regard to concept of artistic expression in the modern period: 1. The concept of ‘expression’ has played a variety of roles in different accounts of art, and that its two most prominent roles have been (a) as a mark of the concept of art, and indeed as a proposed necessary and sufficient condition for something being a work of art; and (b) as a prominent, but by no means necessary or universal, kind of artistic meaning; and 2. A salient way in which a particular conception of expression has pervaded artistic thinking of the past two hundred years is in what M. H. Abrams called the ‘expressive theory’, wherein a work of art is conceptualized as an expression of the mental states—feeling, emotions, and moods—of the artist who made the work, and that these mental states ‘infect’ (in Tolstoy’s influential term) the mind of a suitably prepared and attuned recipient in any successful action of artistic communication. I turn now to the consideration of what seems to be a major shift in these conceptualizations and usages of the concept of expression around 1960. One might think that radicality of this shift, which seems to result in the broad abandonment of the expressive theory, is one of the marks of the end of the modern period in the arts, and marks the beginning of a new period, nowadays usually referred to as ‘contemporary art’, and it does seem that the particular conceptualization of modern art that Meyer Schapiro so brilliantly laid out (as discussed in the previously posted part 2) loses its social actuality around 1960. On the other hand, the expressive theory certainly survives to this day, if only in an etiolated and fragmentary way in the common-sense thought that all art is in some sense a kind of self-expression.

      Perhaps the most common view of the beginning of distinctively contemporary visual art is that it arises with the work of Andy Warhol, in particular his silk screens from the years 1962 to 1965, such as his numerous pieces consisting of repeated, blown-up images of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, or of instantly recognizable instances of everyday industrialized commodities such as Campbell’s soup cans.  An enormous amount has been written about these works, but for purposes of considering their role in contributing to the demise of the expressive I turn to the classic review by the poet and critic David Antin from 1966. In his review Antin attempts to describe and analyze what he calls “the most curious aspects” of Warhol’s work which arise as if out of an examination of the statement “An image is a proposition about reality.” Antin notes several salient characteristics of Warhol’s works: the faces in the images he reproduces and multiplies are for the most part presented frontally; the images are enlarged; the images are typically presented in a way that omits their context; and the repeated images are unlike, in that they are printed with different degrees of clarity, and the coloring of the images changes from instance to instance, and in a seemingly arbitrary manner. Because the figures presented are instantly recognizable, and the operations of mechanical reproduction, repetition, and arbitrary application of somewhat misaligned coloring evoke extended mechanical and chemical processes to which an original image is subjected, Antin declares that Warhol’s central interest is in “the deteriorated image,” and that in Warhol’s hands this type of image is intrinsically enigmatic because “there is no apparent context to which it can be related, and yet the scale, the centrality suggest that there is some context.” One kind of context that would provide the image with intelligibility would be a narrative context: if the depicted faces could be seen as playing a role in an intelligible sequence of actions, the faces would thereby gain some determinate expression as a manifestation of the person’s reaction to some action or actions. Yet for Warhol’s most disturbing images, such as the Marilyns, there is some context, some “sense of hidden meaning . . . enhanced by public tragedy . . . Surely lurking somewhere behind it is some cue, some information communicating a private agony.” Despite the images’ ‘deteriorated’ quality, we maintain some “belief in the moment of truth made visible.” In light of our previous discussion of Schapiro’s account of modern art, we could say that something of that art’s basic assumption of the physiognomic and expressive character of marks and images is retained. But while the assumption is mobilized, the viewer’s desire for some determinate expression is never satisfied: “Somewhere in the image there is a proposition. It is unclear.” This way in which everything in Warhol’s work of this period conspires to incite a desire that it never satisfies seems to fit comfortably under the philosopher Bence Nanay’s recent suggestion for characterizing artistic profundity as a quality of “actively challenging any straightforward interpretative activity (while at the same time nudges [sic] you to keep on trying to interpret it).”

     In order to see something of how this break-up of the expressivist theory in contemporary art plays out, let’s consider the work of the painter Frank Bowling, in whose work the key assumption of the expressivist theory is rejected and heroically exposed. Bowling was born in British Guiana in 1934, and moved to London in 1953. Bowling was a late starter though rapid learner, only beginning to paint and draw in the mid-late 1950s, and entering art school in 1958. Already by 1962 the art critic and historian Norbert Lynton identified Bowling in print as “an expressionist of striking power and individuality” and noted that “[Bowling] draws his material from immediate experience, and endows that material with a passionate vividness that makes self-identification unavoidable.” (quoted in Gooding, p. 37) In the mid-1960s Bowling moved to New York City, where he was closely involved with major figures in poetry and the visual arts, including the painter Larry Rivers and, in the early 1970s, the art critic Clement Greenberg. He spent several years in the late 1960s attempting to align himself with the emerging Black Arts movement, the fruit of which were a number of large paintings of maps, primarily of South America or Africa, done over with largely monochrome washes. By the early 1970s he rejected the premises of Black Arts ideology, stating in 1976 “I spent the from late ’67 to ’71 suffering through the whole nonsense about Black Art. I used up an awful lot of physical and psychic energy trying to get that together, and I found most of it had nothing to do with my real self . . . there is no Black Art. There is Classical or Tribal African Art, but not Black Art. I believe that the Black soul, if there can be such a thing, belongs in Modernism. Black people are a quite new and original people.” (quoted in Gooding, p. 78; note Bowling’s affirmation that his art should and does have ‘something to do’ with his ‘real self’) In 1972 Bowling abandoned figuration, never to return to it, in favor of large abstract canvases that initially evoked atmospheric fields and horizons with broad bands of monochrome mists. By the late 1970s the application of the paint became denser, and gravitational pulls in varying directions emerged as orientations multiplied and became less certain. Color and its seemingly infinite permutations through expanse, saturation, juxtaposition, and overlaying became Bowling’s focus. The question then arises: how might this trajectory, culminating with the particularly distinguished body of work of the past three decades, be understood as of a piece with Bowling’s interest in an art that has ‘something to do’ with his real self?

     I do not know how to give anything like a fully satisfying answer to this question, but part of the answer must, I think, involve some consideration of a single piece of writing that Bowling has cited a number of times as particularly important to him. This piece is an essay by the philosopher Richard Wollheim (whose work on artistic meaning was briefly canvassed in the earlier second part of this lecture) published in 1964 entitled ‘On Expression and Expressionism’. It’s certainly unusual that a working artist would consider such a difficult piece of academic writing as central to his work. This essay was Wollheim’s first attempt at making sense of the obscure concept of expression in art; over the following thirty-five years he was to devote several papers and chapters of books to the topic, most of which develop a positive account of artistic expression as a variety of artistic meaning that drew from the human capacity to perceive parts of nature as embodying emotions, with the additional point that the realized intentions of the artist provide a criterion of correct perception of expression in non-natural, artistic contexts. This first attempt by Wollheim, one that made such an impression upon Bowling, is distinguished from his later writings on the topic in its largely negative and questioning character: the last page of the essay contains ten sentences that end with question marks! I restrict consideration of this intricately argued piece to points that touch on aspects of the expressivist theory. Wollheim begins with a discussion from the opening pages of an “odd and penetrating” book by the psychoanalyst Marion Milner, published under the pseudonym Joanna Field, entitled On Not Being Able to Paint. Milner’s book describes her difficulties in making drawings and paintings that successfully expressed the moods and ideas she intended to express; indeed, she found that her pictures expressed ‘the opposite’ of what she intended. Wollheim then pursues the question of what it would mean to (successfully) express one’s emotions in a work of art, something we might attempt to indicate by saying in a highly metaphorical way that the artist has ‘put’  “a particular feeling or emotion into an object of activity.” (273) Characterizing expression in this manner involves two distinct items--an activity (say, of painting), and a result of the activity (say, a mark)—in a determinate relationship. Now, what we have called the expressivist theory, and what Wollheim touches on in a reference to the account of abstract expressionist painting influentially given by the critic Harold Rosenberg, assumes that “the transmission of expressiveness [passes] from activity to trace.” As we have seen, this is the key claim of the expressivist theory, from which follows its characterization of the work of art and of the appropriate activity of the viewer or reader. That is, on this account the character of the activity of making embodies some mental state of the artist, and this same mental state is expressed in the work that results from that activity. But how can this happen? Wollheim suggests that such expressiveness can only arise as a result of the artist’s use of the specific characteristics of the material that is worked, and out of the specific manner of the work. And these are not something that can be fully determined in advance. Since the same sort of (expressive) activity could give rise to qualitatively different expressions, “we must conclude that there is no necessary transmission of expressiveness from activity to trace.” (281) More securely grounded is the transmission of expressiveness from trace to activity: to perceive and appreciate artistic expressiveness, one does not begin with observed activity of an artist, and then attribute expressiveness to the resultant remark; rather some playing a particular role, someone called ‘the spectator’ (who could be the artist herself playing the role) must first see the mark, and in seeing it, judge it an instance of successful expression. The spectator may then infer back from mark to expressive activity, expressive, that is, of the sort of activity from which that very mark would result. Here, in this initial essay, Wollheim goes no further, except to raise difficulties in the form of a series of questions for the assumptions behind the idea that artistic expression could be the result of an artist painting in a manner guided by rules.

      One might think that Wollheim’s arguments in philosophy against the idea that artistic expression flows from activity to mark loosely harmonize with the widespread rejection around 1960 in the arts of the kinds of modern poetics in which the expressivist theory finds its home, in Warhol and many others. But how might this particular essay of Wollheim’s figured in Bowling’s determination to pursue his ‘real self’ as a Black modernist who works outside the framework of Black Art? In the forthcoming final part of this lecture, I’ll address, though not solve, this problem, and further consider in the early work of Nam June Paik and the recent work of the dance-theater artist Carol Trindade a hitherto unmentioned kind of artistic expressiveness prominent in contemporary art.

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References:

David Antin, “Warhol: The Silver Tenement” (1966) in Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature 1966 to 2005 (2011)

Joanna Field (Marion Milner), On Not Being Able to Paint (1950)

Mel Gooding, Frank Bowling (2021)

Bence Nanay, “Looking for Profundity (in All the Wrong Places)” in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 79, Issue 3, Summer 2021

Harold Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters’ (1952) in The Tradition of the New (1962)

Richard Wollheim, ‘On Expression and Expressionism’ (1964) in Revue Internationale de Philosophie

Vol. 18, No. 68/69 (2/3) (1964)

Expression in Contemporary Art, Part 2: The Expressive Theory in Modern Art

The following is the second of four parts of a condensed proto-draft of a future lecture on expression in contemporary art. The first part appears as my previous blog post:

      Previously we considered some basic features of philosophical accounts of the concept of art and of the roles that expression does or might play in them. Although there is little plausibility to the idea that an artifact’s possessing or embodying  expression or expressiveness is either a necessary or sufficient condition for the artifact’s being a work of art, the thought that expression in some sense often contributes to some of the kinds of meaning and significance characteristic of works of art seems more promising. As we saw, the philosopher Richard Wollheim considered ‘expressive seeing’, the capacity to see a bit of nature as embodying or expressing some emotion, as one of the three great perceptual capacities, along with representational seeing and visual pleasure, that artists recruit from and elaborate upon in building up artistic meaning. Now in the modern period of the arts, from roughly the year 1800 through the 1950s, the appeal to a particular kind of expressiveness is overwhelming dominant in characterizing both the distinctive powers of the arts and their most valuable instances. On the classic account given by the literary scholar M. H. Abrams, there emerges in 1800 in the poet William Wordsworth’s Preface to his volume Lyric Ballads the ‘expressive theory’, which is first stated as a definition of poetry: Wordsworth writes that “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” that is, of the feelings of the poet, which are then expressed in the poem. By 1833 the philosopher John Stuart Mill has developed this into a philosophical conception of poetry: (a) lyric poetry is “more eminently and peculiarly poetry than any other”; (b) the best kind of poetry is ‘natural poetry’ wherein human feeling enters more intensely than in other kinds of poetry; (c) the aim of the best kind of poetry is not the depiction of the world, but rather of the poet’s state of mind in contemplating the world; and (d) the best poetry is fundamentally a soliloquy, where the primary audience of the poem is the poet herself; other readers besides the poet may be entranced by the poem and pay homage to the poet, but their responses, whether positive or negative, play no role in determining the value of the poem. (Abrams, pp. 21-26) Perhaps the clearest statement of the expressive theory, and one that was most influential in the first half of the twentieth-century, was that given by Leo Tolstoy in his late work What is Art?  Tolstoy defines art (Section V) as “that human activity which consists in one man’s consciously conveying to others, by certain external signs, the feelings he has experienced, and in others being infected by those feelings and also experiencing them.” And similarly to the way Mill connected the definition of art with an account of artistic value, Tolstoy continues (Section XV): “The stronger the infection the better the art is as art, regardless of its content—that is, independently of the worth of the feelings it conveys. Art becomes more or less infectious owing to three conditions: (1) the greater or lesser particularity of the feeling conveyed; (2) the greater or lesser clarity with which the feeling is conveyed; and (3) the artist’s sincerity, that is, the greater or lesser force with which the artist himself experiences the feelings he conveys.” For Tolstoy the third condition is the most important, as the particularity and clarity of the feelings expressed in a work flow from the artist’s sincerity in initially feeling.

     This basic conception of the expressive theory is prima facie afflicted by two overlapping implausibilities, as was frequently noticed. First, the basic conception perhaps requires, and certainly implies, that the artist must be in the grips of the emotion expressed in her art work during the conception and creation of the work. But the testimony of history counts against this, as when a happy poet produces a melancholy poem (the crudeness of the example, as evidenced in the use of the terms ‘happy’ and ‘melancholy’, is not atypical in the discussions of the theory). Secondly, the basic conception of the expressive theory seems to require that the feeling expressed in the finished work was experienced by the artist with the same identity, and the same degree of determinacy and detail, prior to the artist’s making the work. This seems to disallow the intuition that artist’s frequently discover what the work expresses in the very process of making the work. More developed versions of the expressive theory will then take into account these objections, and allow that the artist need only be familiar with the feeling or emotion to be expressed, and not necessarily in the grips of it; and that the feeling or emotion expressed in the work may be an elaboration and developed version of what the artist was initially familiar with. But whether in its basic or developed conception, the expressive theory can plausibly thought to underlie and legitimate much prominent visual art of the first half of the twentieth-century. The art critic Roger Fry, for example, testifies in 1920 to the importance of Tolstoy’s statement of it in sweeping away the concern for beauty in the visual arts, and replacing it with a focal concern upon the artist’s sensibility, her feelings, emotions, and moods, and how these might be expressed in the creative process and in a finished work of art.

     In 1948 the art historian Meyer Schapiro delivered a lecture entitled ‘The Value of Modern Art’, ostensibly in response to a series of public attacks on modern art by the director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York City and the president of the United States. These worthies denigrated modern art as respectively “meaningless and pornographic” and “unhealthy.” In response Schapiro offered a defense of modern art in the form of a stylistic analysis, first characterizing the typical subjects and manners of treating those subjects, then uncovering aims and assumptions of the art. (Schapiro, pp. 134-141) The typical themes of modern art are (i) “things that belong to the direct experience of the eye . . . that part of our everyday world that we experience simply by looking at it,” such as landscapes, domestic interiors, and beautiful human beings; (ii) “the world of the artist,” especially the artist’s studio and its contents; (iii) “the consciousness of art itself,” paradigmatically in abstract paintings such elements as colors, lines, spots, and patches; and (iv) “the world of the self,” including the artist’s feelings, dreams, and free associations. The typical manners of rendering these themes are likewise four: (a) the work exhibits “a most vivid sense of its making,” as with the visible and isolated touch or stroke; (b) the work foregrounds “the concreteness of the surface,” so that the work manifests itself not as it were something to be looked through, but rather to be looked at, so as to register “a new frankness and directness of expression;” (c) the work is pervaded with a new sense of ‘randomness’, so that the composition “looks undesigned, independent of any a priori scheme;” and (d) the work foregrounds the activity of ‘transformation’ so “that we are aware, simultaneously, of a raw material that has provided certain themes or elements of form and the final processed result, in such a manner that both are somehow preserved in the work.” There’s a great deal further that could be said about this analysis, which strikes me illuminating, indeed profoundly penetrating; but for our purposes I can only turn to Schapiro’s further consideration of what assumptions are made in the very practice of modern art, if something like this stylistic account is accurate. Schapiro follows the analysis with a consideration of the change in taste represented by modern art. He notes that along with the rise of modern art itself “more of the art of the world is accessible to modern art than was available in the past.” (p. 146) What made this change of taste possible was the prior acceptance of two aesthetic principles basic to modern art: “first, that any mark made by a human being, any operation of the hand, is characterized by tendencies toward form, toward coherence . . . [and] Secondly, every such product of the human hand or the human personality has what we call physiognomic qualities. It is felt by us instantly as a piece of the soul or the self that produced it.” This widespread acceptance of something like this second principle must underlie the plausibility of the expressive theory; as already in the early formulations of Mill and others, the work and the sensibility (or ‘soul’ or ‘self’) of the artist are of the same substance, and so one can reliably infer back from a perceived, expressive work to artist’s sensibility and the expressive, meaning-bearing aspects of the creative process.

    If something like Schapiro’s account is accurate for the period immediately after World War II, then it has something of the character of the flight of the owl of Minerva, the bird of wisdom that flies at dusk; for this deeply entrenched practical ideology of modern art that consists of adherence to the two basic aesthetic principles, and which is manifest in the seemingly common-sense character of the expressive theory, collapses in the following decade or two. In the next part of the lecture, and so in the next blog post, we’ll consider the direct assault on the expressive theory in the work of Andy Warhol from 1962-64, then the more nuanced rejection represented by the early theater and installation work of Nam June Paik and, perhaps most illuminatingly, in the trajectory of the career of the painter Frank Bowling.

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References:

M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953)

Roger Fry, Vision and Design (1920)

Meyer Schapiro, ‘The Value of Modern Art’ (1948) in Worldview in Painting—Art and Society (1999)

Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? (1897)

Expression in Contemporary Art, Part 1: Some Philosophical Prolegomena

The following is the first of four parts of a condensed proto-draft of a future lecture on expression in contemporary art:

How might we approach the topic of expression in art? One prominent approach in philosophizing about the arts begins with asking the question ‘What is art?’, and then seeking an answer in the form of a definition that states the necessary and sufficient conditions for a thing being an instance of art. A successful definition-centered account of art must then further provide some mechanisms or rules of judgment whereby instances of are distinguishable from two other classes of things. One heterogeneous class of things would ‘ordinary’ objects such as everyday actions, artifacts, and naturally occurring objects. So the account must provide reliable means of relevantly distinguishing, on the one hand, ordinary monochrome exterior walls and my joyful rhythmic hopping at the thought of the imminent demise of capitalism, from on the other hand a painting by Barnett Newman and the performance of a dance choreographed by Twyla Tharp; the latter, and not the former, are instances of art, and the account must provide some account of why. A great many of such accounts have been offered in the past century, and the story of these proposals and their seeming defeat through counter-examples is by now a standard topic in academic teaching. For this line of thinking ‘expression’ plays the role of a failed answer to the question ‘What is art?’, one that was offered in the wake of the great shift in European artistic sensibility around the turn of the nineteenth century, a shift that was famously described by M. H. Abrams the replacement of the theory that art is fundamentally an imitation of nature to the new Romantic theory that art is an expression, especially of the mind, sensibility, moods, and emotions of the artist. In terms of emblematic metaphors, this is the shift from conceiving art as a mirror to conceiving it as a lamp. So a Romantic answer to the question ‘What is art?’ would be something like ‘art = an artifact or performance that expresses the mind (mental states, emotions, etc.) of the artist’, and in this crude statement it would immediately fall to counter-examples like my joyful hopping.

     A second kind of definition-centered account would be one where the definition does not primarily state characteristics that are intrinsic to the concept or its bearers, but also and primarily characteristics that are extrinsic or delimitational. (on the distinction with specific reference to the concept of art, see Binkley 1976). So Hegel argues that there are three sorts of practices that embody what he calls ‘Absolute Spirit’, religion, art, and philosophy, and that these three are differentiated in terms of their relative manner of embodiment in images and language. Analogously, Claude Lévi-Strauss treats art and myth as alternative modes of the broader activity he calls ‘bricolage’, ways of putting heterogeneous things together with a set of finite tools not made for that particular task of composition. Lévi-Strauss contraposes ‘mythical reflection’ as a process wherein a bricoleur develops “structured sets, not directly out of other structured sets [in particular out of bits of language, specifically “the rubble of earlier social discourse”] (Lévi-Strauss p. 25), but from the residues and debris of events”, over against art which through bricolage sets up scale-models of the world, addressed to human beings who, through contemplation, come to form supplementary perspectives on what is presented in the model (pp. 28-9). The concept of expression typically plays no distinctive role in these accounts, as much of the conceptual work involved in constructing them will involve characterizing the distinctive aims, media, and manner of treating materials in the various large-scale practices (myth and art for Lévi-Strauss; religion, art, and philosophy for Hegel).

      A different class of approaches starts from the thought that the concept of art per se is too indeterminate or too complex or too historically variable to serve as the focus of inquiry; a more secure focus for reflection is the concept of artistic meaningfulness, either in general across art forms, or in particular as embodied in distinctive, concrete art forms and practices such as painting or sculpture. Perhaps the most elaborated and sophisticated member of this sub-class of ways of framing the issue comes from the philosopher Richard Wollheim. In an initial formulation he invokes Lévi-Strauss’s account of bricolage as provided a proto-image of the creative process in art wherein materials at hand acquire (further) meaning. He formulates this as ‘the bricoleur problem’, “why certain arbitrarily identified stuffs or process should be vehicles of art.” (Wollheim 1980, p. 43) In a major later writing he narrows and focuses the bricoleur problem into the question of how artistic paintings acquire meaning. Wollheim characterizes the process whereby meaningfulness accrues to pictorial making as ‘thematization’, where in marking a surface an artist notices features—the mark, the surface, the edge--, and is guided in their further marking by the goal of endowing the emerging picture with content, and this in diverse ways. (Wollheim 1987, pp. 19-23) Content in artistic painting draws from three great sources in human capacities: the human ability to see and recognize something in a marked surface, as expressed, for example, when one looks at a drawing and sees a lion; the ability to see things as expressive of emotions, as when, for example, one looks at a rainy landscape and sees it as melancholy; and the capacity to experience visual pleasure, as when, for example, one sees a picture of a domestic interior, and recognizes something of the real thing in its depiction, and simultaneously something of the depiction in the real thing. (Wollheim 1987, pp. 46-100). So on Wollheim’s account, expression is a major characteristic, though not invariably one, of painting practiced as an art form.

    In the next forthcoming installment here we’ll consider the particular conception of expression embodied in major aspects of modern art, and how that conception seems to collapse in prominent instances of visual art around 1960 and shortly thereafter.

References:

Timothy Binkley, “Deciding about Art” in Culture and Art (1976), edited by Lars Aagaard-Mogensen

G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on Fine Art (delivered 1820’s)

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Wild Thought ((1962) 2021)

Richard Wollheim, Art and its objects ((first edition 1968) 1980) and Painting as an Art (1987)

Why Readymades? Critical Remarks on Thierry de Duve’s Aesthetics at Large (2018)

Probably no artist has been more widely or more frequently mentioned as the founder of Contemporary art than Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp was active as a painter in the first decade of the twentieth century, and, despite having proclaimed that he had abandoned art in the 1920’s, worked for twenty years until 1966 on his sculptural installation Étant donnés. The body of his work that has allegedly founded Contemporary art is his so-called ‘readymades’, which he produced in the second decade of the twentieth century. The distinctive feature of the readymade is that the work is not so much made by the artist as chosen by the artist. The object chosen is not chosen primarily for its perceived aesthetic qualities, as a Chinese scholar might choose an especially fantastic rock to display, or the Inka might position and display an especially evocative stone. Rather the object chosen is an industrial artifact—an airplane propeller, a shovel, a urinal--, which is then exhibited as an artwork by the artist-chooser. In some cases the object is exhibited without alteration, but more commonly the object is ‘assisted’ with minimal and markedly unskillful additions, as with Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ (1917), a urinal upon which Duchamp has scrawled the date and the signature ‘R. Mutt’.  A standard line of thinking urges that the readymades provided the originating exemplar of Contemporary art, long avant la lettre, and that their acceptance as central instances of art altered both the implicit working ontology of the visual arts, and induced a shift in the central ideologies partially motivating and legitimating the making of art. In a series of books written in French in the 1980’s, and re-worked and published in English in the 1990’s, the Belgian art critic and theorist Thierry de Duve has given the most elaborated and celebrated version of this way of conceptualizing Contemporary art. His recent book Aesthetics at Large largely repeats his earlier account, but fleshes out the historical and social dimensions of the account, and considers some of the implications of his account for museum practice. De Duve’s account draws massively on aspects of the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (the book’s cover proclaims that ‘Kant got it right’), and the book accordingly polemicizes against what de Duve takes to be the major alternative accounts, those deriving from the philosopher Hegel, especially the account proposed in Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory.

     De Duve’s central claims with regard to recent visual art are unchanged since Kant after Duchamp. They are: 1. Duchamp’s readymades of the mid-1910’s inaugurate and mark a turning point in the history of the visual arts. With these works visual art passes from a condition wherein painting is the paradigmatic visual art, and visual works of art generally gain their status as artworks and their most distinctive meanings via the physical media that embody them. 2. Kant’s Critique of Judgment provides the full set of conceptual resources needed to explain and understand the distinctive features of the readymade and the recent visual art generally, so long as one replaces each occurrence in Kant’s text of the word ‘beauty’ with the word ‘art’, and drops Kant’s discussions of the sublime, art, and teleology. The remaining and altered fragment of Kant primarily involves his account of the pure judgment of taste and his remarks on so-called ‘sensus communis’, the faculty allegedly possessed by human beings which underlies the claim of aesthetic judgments to significance beyond the expression of personal taste. According to de Duve, both of these claims are meant to be understood as opposing some prevailing conceptualization in recent theorizing about the visual arts. The first claim opposes the idea that Duchamp’s readymades are a kind of sui generis invention with no relation to any preceding art form. De Duve counters with the claim that the readymades mark a passage from the ‘specific’ conception of visual art, wherein the claim to art status is carried by a work’s placement within a particular artistic medium (such as painting), to a ‘general’ conception wherein works as it were immediately embody their status as art within being part of a historically entrenched artistic medium. The second claim opposes, so de Duve asserts, Hegel’s refusal “to reconcile metaphysics with human finitude” (p. 117) by positing “the notion that total, absolute realization of spirit in the actual world accomplishes the ineluctable process of history itself.” (p. 116) Adorno allegedly adds an anti-Hegelian ‘wound of nihilism’ (p. 130) to this fundamentally Hegelian outlook in claiming that spirit has in fact not been realized in the modern world. De Duve claims that by contrast his approach takes up Kant’s ‘landmark achievement’ (p. 117) in reconciling metaphysics with finitude by working out the ways in which modern and contemporary art do, contra Adorno, have a right to exist as autonomous cultural practices separate from religion and a religious aim of reconciling ourselves to human finitude. (p. 138)

     The recent book adds to these unchanged claims a third claim, one that primarily provides historical scaffolding to the first claim: 3. The social condition of the visual arts has shifted over the past 150 years from the system of the Beaux-Arts to that of ‘Art-in-General’ (pp. 32-33) On de Duve’s account, the Beaux-Arts system was fundamentally a political system wherein the jury of the annual Salon not only choose which works would enter the prestigious yearly exhibitions, but, through these choices and the jury’s prestige, controlled the careers of artists. As a political agency, the Beaux-Arts system overlapped, but was not identical with, the system of the fine arts, which, on the canonical account of Paul Kristeller, treated a small number of arts—painting, sculpture, music, theater, poetry, dance—as ‘fine’ arts that bore the possibilities of particularly rich and powerful meanings, as opposed to the ‘applied’ arts, such as landscape architecture or embroidery. The Beaux-Arts system collapsed with the establishment in 1884 of the Society for Independent Artists; consequently, de Duve thinks, in the absence of a central political control, “[a]nyone could proclaim himself an artist.” A immediate consequence of this, de Duve asserts, is that “[a]nything and everything had become a plausible candidate to art status,” and with his series of readymades it was Duchamp who first demonstrated this. (p. 33) The visual arts of the past two hundred years, then, occur within three periods: the pre-Duchampian period up to 1884; the Duchampian period of High Modernism, a period of “transition and incubation” (p. 37), which begins before Duchamp’s birth but whose defining achievement is the readymades; and the post-Duchampian period starting in 1964 when certain exemplary artists ‘receive Duchamp’s message’ and the readymade model and its enveloping ideologies become central to the visual arts. De Duve cites as an early example of this shift the Fluxus artist George Brecht’s claim that “anything can be art and anyone can do it.” (p. 35)

      De Duve’s exposition of the second claim, that Kant’s Critique of Judgment exhaustively provides the conceptual apparatus needed to understand the basic features of Contemporary (post-Duchampian) visual art is so intricate, idiosyncratic, and implausible that I refrain here from explication. Suffice to say that de Duve follows Kant in thinking there is a basic kind of judgment (for Kant the aesthetic judgment of beauty, for de Duve the judgment that something is a work of art) that is based upon ‘feeling’, not concepts, but which nonetheless is addressed to all and so presumes agreement from others. De Duve seems to think further that each work of (presumptive) art poses the question ‘Is this art?’, and that the judgment ‘this is a work of art’ exhausts the challenge and interest presented by the work; there is no issue, de Duve thinks, of relative quality within the contemporary arts, but only of whether the work merits the appellation ‘work of art’. 

     Here I can only note a few basic points that express something of my dissatisfaction with de Duve’s account:

1.     De Duve repeatedly states that the central and indeed unavoidable question proposed by a putative contemporary work of art is ‘Is this a work of art?’ But why is this important? The effect of one’s answering ‘yes’ is supposed to be (only?) that the proposed work joins the large set of all the other works that one has judged to be art in one’s lifetime. So what?

2.     For de Duve, the judgment that something is a work of art is like a roach hotel: you can check in, but you can’t check out. De Duve never considers so much as the possibility that one might revise one’s judgment, or what sort of countervailing considerations might motivate such a revision.

3.     De Duve thinks that the readymades are both central and foundational to post-Duchamp/contemporary art. How can such a view be reconciled with the evident fact of the massive centrality and stability of the practices of drawing, painting, and sculpture, cross-culturally and trans-historically, and up to the present? How can such a view be reconciled with the preeminence and evident achievement of the work of, for example, William Kentridge, who draws, animates, installs, and performs as if Duchamp never existed?

4.     Why is ‘judgment’ supposed to be so central and important as to relegate other questions to insignificance? It seems to me more typical that a response to contemporary art specifically and the arts generally is rather a sustained perceptual encounter, wherein the works as it were teach the viewer what is important. The question ‘is this art?’ does not clearly arise; rather, across a vast range of the arts, the work is taken to be an artwork, and the viewer responds to saliences and tracks meanings as they emerge.

Although de Duve is unquestionably an engaging and highly intelligent writer, it seems to me that his work represents a conceptual disaster for thinking about contemporary art. Perhaps some of its value, even for those of us who reject his approach and claims wholesale, is that it is the best worked out and focused account of widespread and more typically diffuse and poorly articulated ideologies in contemporary art.

References:

 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1969)

Thierry de Duve, Aesthetics at Large: Volume 1  Art, Ethics, Politics  (2018)

---Kant after Duchamp (1996)

---Pictorial Nominalism (1991)

G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on Fine Art (1975; delivered in the 1820’s)

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790)

Paul O. Kristeller, ‘The Modern System of the Arts” (1951-52) in Renaissance Thought and the Arts: Collected Essays (1980)

On Paul Crowther's What Drawing and Painting Really Mean--Part 2

     In my previous blog post I introduced the thought that a characteristic feature of contemporary visual arts is that works of art are allegedly made not only in art media as traditionally defined—graphite on paper as a drawing, oil paint on canvas as a painting, and so forth--; but also works are made in expanded versions of traditional media—an animated film is an instance of (expanded) drawing, an artist’s display of fireworks is an instance of (expanded) painting, etc. I then sketched the philosophical account of drawing and painting recently offered in Paul Crowther’s What Drawing and Painting Really Mean (2017) as a potential contribution to thinking about whether, in what senses, and to what ends one might think of non-traditional artistic activities as parts of expanded media. Again, Crowther’s account goes like this: Painting and drawing are best and most fully understood as instances of what the philosopher Ernst Cassirer referred to as ‘symbolic forms’, which are systematic ways for human beings of exhibiting and developing non-compulsory activities, institutions, and media wherein they articulate their most basic orientation to the world as sensuous, perceiving, thinking, embodied beings. Cassirer’s chief examples of symbolic media are language, myth, religion, and art. Crowther extends Cassirer’s account to the particular art forms of drawing and painting, which share a common structure given in the phrase ‘marking a surface’. Marked surfaces carry a range of meanings, as the results of gestures, as possessing visual or pictorial dynamics, and as articulating existential relationships to the self and the world. Drawing and painting differ in that the former involves the creation of points and lines on a surface, bears the sense of incising the surface, and leaves parts of the surface untouched and unaltered; whereas painting involves depositing of pigment on a surface and so not altering the surface through incision or pressure, the tendency to cover the entire surface, and with that covering to introduce to a heightened degree the sense of light, and a further sense of the general animation of the world. How might we assess Crowther’s account and its contribution to critiquing the concept of an expanded artistic medium? Consider how Crowther differentiates his account in claiming that painting and drawing are symbolic forms. Early in the book he notes that only the philosopher Richard Wollheim “has focused on the properties of drawing and painting as unique artistic media in any extended way.” (p. 7) Crowther refers in particular to Wollheim’s book Painting as an Art (1987), wherein begins his account of artistic painting with a thought model of ‘Ur-painting’, the conceptually primordial action of depositing paint on a surface so as to produce an artistic painting. Wollheim’s account presupposes that human beings possess a basic perceptual capacity for ‘seeing-in’, that is, the ability to see things in a marked surface. So, for example, there are some lines on a piece of paper, and I ‘see-in’ those lines a lion, and ‘twofoldness’ is the property possessed by certain marked surfaces of affording the experience of ‘seeing-in’. Wollheim’s description of Ur-painting covers six pages (Wollheim  pp.19-25), and Crowther summarizes it as follows: “First, the painter intentionally marks a support using a “charged instrument”; second, as marks are placed, and an unmarked and decreasing area is left, the mark-placing is done with reference to the relation between the marked and unmarked area; third, the painter’s mark-placing also takes account of how the marks relate to the edge of the support; fourth, the painter notices that some marks appear to “coalesce” as wholes or form units or unified groups; fifth, the painter notices that these “motifs” manifest the “seeing-in” phenomenon noted above; and, sixth, all the forgoing aspects converge in some underlying purpose for which the painting is undertaken.” (p. 7) Crowther makes two comments on Wollheim’s conception of Ur-painter. A minor issue is that Wollheim’s third point concerning the marker’s taking account of the edge of the support is historically misplaced, in that the evidence of many millennia of Paleolithic painting shows no concern for the edge; such concern is a late historical development (p. 78 n.11). The major issue for Crowther is that Wollheim’s account under-characterizes the meaning and complexity of each point. He then suggests that “[t]he whole question needs to be approached from a more comprehensive viewpoint,” (p. 7) namely, that offered by Cassirer’s notion of symbolic form.

     Now, a striking feature of Crowther’s summary of Ur-painting is that he partly re-interprets, and partly ignores what Wollheim treats as a central feature of any artistic painting, the fundamental procedure of investing painting with meaning that Wollheim calls ‘thematization’. Wollheim initially characterizes thematization as “this process by which the agent abstracts some hitherto unconsidered, hence unintentional aspect, of what he [sic] is doing or what he is working on, and makes the thought of this feature contribute to guiding his future activity.” (Wollheim, p. 20) Thematization is fundamentally and ineliminably teleological; it “is always for an end” and the artist “thematizes in pursuit of a purpose,” namely to add content or meaning to the marked surface (Wollheim p. 21 and p. 22). Wollheim adds that when painting is pursued as an art, the artist’s aim is not only to endow the surface with meaning or content, but also to give and get pleasure; his formulation leaves is uncertain as to whether he thinks that the giving and getting of pleasure is also an aim of thematization. In his book on the philosophy of drawing, Patrick Maynard similarly (but perhaps not identically to Wollheim’s treatment) treats thematization as a central activity, however various its mechanisms and techniques, wherein the artist transforms drawing simpliciter into artistic drawing as part of the project of maximally enriching a drawing and its subject.

     If not through thematization, then how does Crowther then conceive the ways in which drawings and paintings acquire meaning and content? In much of Crowther’s accounts of drawing and painting, he does not distinguish features these activities possess simpliciter from further characteristics that the activities possess as art forms. Seemingly even the most basic depictive drawings and paintings possess the rich structure, and even the metaphysical resonances, given in Crowther’s phenomenological accounts. It’s striking that Crowther does not attempt to give a sustained account of how drawings and paintings acquire metaphysical implications, but rather restricts himself to describing the ways that they possess such implications. The variety of verbs that Crowther uses to characterize the relation between marked surface and its primary characteristics on the one hand, and the metaphysical implication on the other, shows this: the way in which drawings and paintings preserve a moment ‘discloses’ deeper truths (p. 105); drawing and painting ‘exemplify’ features and conditions of occupying space (p. 114); drawings and paintings ‘refer back’ to their origins in gesture and handling materials (p. 154). Scattered remarks in the book suggest that Crowther’s is that artistic drawing and painting is strongly continuous with drawing and painting simpliciter (a view to which surely almost everyone would assent), but the chief feature characterizing their practice as art forms is the way in which the artist-marker gives her works a higher degree of consistency, and so gives the product a heightened (open) unity, the effect of which in turn is to afford a relatively richer and more intense experience of the intrinsic fascination that attaches to these kinds of artifacts (see pp. 71-72 for Crowther’s most sustained discussion of this).

      Lacking an explicit discussion by Crowther of Wollheim on thematization, I’m unclear on which points and to what extent Crowther might accept ‘thematization’ as indicating the basic features of the creative process wherein an artist creates meaning and content for their work; but perhaps enough has been said to indicate what contribution Crowther’s account might make to the question of ‘extended’ (artistic) media. Crowther would, I think, broadly agree with Wollheim, Maynard, and Lopes that an artistic medium is not individuated solely through the presence of certain materials in putative instances of the medium. Each of these philosophers offers a different account of what constitutes and individuates an artistic medium, in ways that I cannot address here but which seem to me broadly compatible. Crowther’s distinctive applied account here stresses the structural richness of the medium and its typical metaphysical implications. So a rough formula for Crowther’s conception would be: an artistic medium = materials + techniques + complex (visual) structures + metaphysical implication(s). Now, a putative extended medium arises when an artist eliminates one or more of the features of an (unextended) artistic medium, replaces the eliminated feature with one or more non-standard features, but continues to invite and cultivate the kinds of implications, expectations, and evaluations characteristic of the unextended medium. A paradigm of this, again, is the oeuvre of William Kentridge’s animated films, which Kentridge says always originate in the desire to draw, and which in their ‘jumpy’ unfolding from one altered drawing to the next maintain the sense of the discreteness of the individual drawings. What Crowther’s account might contribute here is his sense of artistic media as symbolic forms, and so (always?) accompanied by metaphysical implications. The thought suggests itself that particular metaphysical implications might be present or absent in a particular work of art, and that their (unexpected) presence or absence might be signs of the process of ‘extending’ media. Of course one wants detailed analyses in order to test this suggestion. But in any case, one might well think that with this book Crowther joins Wollheim and Maynard in offering some of the cognitive tools needed to make sense of the seemingly unprecedented products of contemporary art.

--John Rapko

References:

Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (1944)

---The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 1 (1923)

Paul Crowther, What Drawing and Painting Really Mean: The Phenomenology of     Image and Gesture (2017)

Patrick Maynard, Drawing Distinctions: The Varieties of Graphic Expression (2005)

Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)

On Paul Crowther's What Drawing and Painting Really Mean--Part 1

       One mark of an individual historical period in the arts is that a period is characterized not just by certain styles, but also by the prominence of certain questions. One question that accompanies Modern art is the question ‘Is photography an art?’, and a sign that Modern art comes by an end by around 1970 is the loss of interest in that question, and the concomitant failure of visual artists using video technology to induce the new question ‘Is video an art?’ It is characteristic of the artistic period succeeding Modern art, our period of post-modern or Contemporary art, that such questions of whether such-and-such novel kind of image-making is an art arouse no interest. Our contemporary artistic commonplace is ‘Anything can be a work of art’, and so videos can too. A characteristic question of Contemporary art is rather ‘Is painting dead?’, a question to which affirmative and negative answers flow as regularly as the tides. The fact that no one asks whether sculpture is dead indicates that suggests that painting is questioned because of its status as the leading medium of artistic experimentation and progress in Modern art. The less frequently asked ‘Is drawing important?’ perhaps responds to a different concern, the so-called ‘de-skilling’ in the Contemporary visual arts and the prominence of Conceptual art. In a great range of Conceptual art the foci are artistic interest are the artist’s conceptualizations, wherein the artist’s handling of the materials is conceived as the mere execution of a notionally prior program; as in for example Sol LeWitt’s drawings, the actual making of the physical drawing is just a strictly rule-governed following of the artist’s instructions. In the reign of Conceptual art, painting and drawing are neither artistically living nor interesting.

     A second line of thinking marking Contemporary art suggests that under contemporary conditions traditional art forms and artistic media are neither living nor dead, but rather expanded. The notion of an expanded artistic medium perhaps owes something to Rosalind Krauss’s canonical essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, wherein she argued that advanced sculpture on the 1960s and 1970s is rightly understood not primarily as an internal development of Modern sculpture, but rather as a novel artistic activity whose conceptual foundation is a quasi-logical grid determined by concepts of landscape and architecture, and their opposites not-landscape and not-architecture. She further asserts that sculpture after Modern art, or rather ‘the term ‘sculpture’’, is now only one term among three others designating novel kinds of artistic activity, ‘site-construction’, ‘marked sites’, and ‘axiomatic structures’. These four terms collectively constitute “a universe of terms that are felt to be in opposition within a cultural situation.” (Krauss p.41) Krauss’s argument is difficult and obscure, and marred by a crude polemic against a straw man of ‘historicism’; but her proposal if nothing else resonates with an aspect of nascent Contemporary art that Theodor Adorno described already in 1967: “In recent times the boundaries between the different arts have become fluid, or, more accurately, their demarcation lines have been eroded.” (Adorno p.368)  So one starts to have painting as a kind of theater that further expands and alters theater, or sculpture as a kind of dance that makes dance sculptural. Painting as theater might be one form of ‘expanded painting’, along with the more easily grasped expansions characteristic of late Modern art, such as painting with traditional materials in a non-traditional way (such as shooting paint at a canvas), or using non-traditional or hitherto unaccredited materials and instruments (such as dipping one’s hair into tar and applying paint with movements of the neck).

   So traditional art forms such as painting and drawing have ‘expanded’ in varying ways in Contemporary art to the point where it is unclear whether it is even fruitful to treat them as distinctive ways of art-making. And this resultant uncertainty as to whether painting is a distinctive, individual kind of artistic activity co-exists with the wide latitude in Contemporary art for artistic self-characterization and novel stipulations of the content and appropriate reception of art works; if an artist blows into the wind and declares it a kind of artistic painting, who is to say otherwise? And even prior to Contemporary art there was no consensus as to what individuates different art kinds from each other, nor indeed which art kind(s) are most relevant for the evaluation of any particular work; as Dominic Lopes notes, there are several kinds of kinds of art—genres, styles, traditions, oeuvres, etc.,--and so it not obvious in any case whether, say, the work is best considered first of all as an artistic painting, or a religious painting, or a mid-career work of Rembrandt’s.

     Perhaps the most prominent philosophical response to these concerns is given in Kendall Walton’s essay ‘Categories of Art’, wherein Walton argues that the ‘right’ classification of a work of art plays an essential role in judging the work. As Walton’s essay is complex and the subject of a large secondary literature, I only note here that on his account we cannot so much as be aware of an artwork’s full range of aesthetic properties without having classified the work rightly; for some of the work’s properties are not directly perceivable, and right categorization leads us to grasp some of those properties themselves, as well as aiding us understanding whether each and every of the work’s properties, whether latent or manifest, are standard or non-standard. Applied to a Contemporary work in an ‘expanded’ medium, the essay’s account helps enlighten us, say, as to what sort of non-standard role blowing into the wind might play in a painting. The absence of artistic classifications of genre and medium would then not free the work for unbiased consideration, but rather only allow the presentation of a mutilated and unintelligible slice of the work.

     Paul Crowther’s recent book, What Drawing and Painting Really Mean, is, like so much of his work, an important contribution to philosophical reflection on issues in Modern and Contemporary arts. Here, as in other of his books of the past two decades, he treats art forms most fundamentally as ways in which human beings represent, express, and realize themselves as fundamentally embodied, spatially and temporally located, and self-conscious beings. Crowther first treats drawing and painting together as sharing some basic features of self-conscious beings, and then differentiating them as expressing different aspects of how human beings realize themselves in space. The primitive feature shared by drawing and painting is that both constitutively involve marking a surface (pp. 48-57). Following an opening discussion of the role of images and image-making in the cognition of self-conscious beings, Crowther then, in the core of the book, chapters 2-4, interrogates and explicates at length this proto-action of (a) marking (b) a surface. ‘Marking’ is first of all a human gesture. This means that any marking, and so any drawing and painting, exhibits ‘style’. Marking, and with it style, is a spontaneous activity that conveys something of the sense of the marker’s imaginative and deliberative character, and the fact that the result of the mark is stabilized makes the artist’s imagination accessible to others. This stable accessibility is fundamentally spatial. Crowther calls this quality of pictorial marking drawing’s and painting’s ‘autographic’ quality. Not only does this autographic quality convey something of the marker’s imagination to an audience, but it allows the marker to observe their own imagination, and so both to recruit marking into the process of self-understanding, and to develop their own imagination through further marking. Maximally, the marker’s further elaboration yields two remarkable results: the process and its results are intrinsically fascinating, and out of this, and the pleasure that others take in observing and engaging with this, arise the arts of painting and drawing; and the artist comes to develop, observe, and understand their style to the extent that the artist can “inhabit [italics in the original] his or her own style.” (p. 27)

     The latter element of the term ‘marking a surface’ likewise carries the implication of fundamental spatiality, and the marker’s use of a surface opens up the possibility of the possibility of drawing and painting as fundamentally spatial arts. As famously described by the painter Hans Hofmann, a marked surface induces the sense of figure-ground relations, proto-typically the sense that the marks constitute a bounded figure that is ‘closer’ to the viewer than the background invoked by the surface’s unmarked areas. Further, as Rudolf Arnheim explicated, figural markings on surfaces typically convey a range of qualities and dynamic qualities, such as zigzag lines invoking simultaneously the proto-geometric sense of angles and the dynamic sense of movement. Crowther draws out further consequences from basic features, the most important of which for his account is the way in which the marks and the surface tend to cohere into what he calls an ‘open unity’ (p. 29 and passim). The unity that a drawing or painting exhibits emerges from marking, and so each mark is perceived as related to all the other marks in the work. As fundamentally spatial artifacts, drawings and paintings are in a sense present as a whole, and can be explored in any order and at any distance. Since marks are fundamentally gestural expressions, part of what there is to be seen in a drawing or painting is the “gestural conditions of emergence.” (ibid)

     Up to this point in the order of explication there would be, I suspect, broad agreement with Crowther’s account, at least among those who would grant his claims that there are basic features shared by drawing and painting and that these features carry a range of basic meanings. But the most distinctive and innovative, and so perhaps controversial, aspects of his work stem from his further insistence that these features carry “broader metaphysical implications.” (p. 3) Crowther tries to explicate these implications with two conceptual moves. First, he insists that drawing and painting should be interpreted as instances of ‘symbolic forms’, a conception introduced and developed by the philosopher Ernst Cassirer in the first half of the twentieth century. In Crowther’s words, symbolic forms are “logically distinctive modes of reference that can be developed creatively under different historical and cultural circumstances . . . Symbolic forms transcend mere semantics to exemplify different ways in which humanity inhabits Being.” (ibid) Symbolic forms are individuated by their distinctive ways in which they embody and articulate basic features of human embodiment, cognition, and communication. Whereas Cassirer differentiates symbolic forms broadly as comprising language, myth, religion, art, and science, Crowther treats the individual art forms of drawing and painting as distinctive symbolic forms, each with its distinctive way of ‘inhabiting Being’. Second, Crowther argues that drawing and painting (and perhaps all the arts) attain the status of symbolic forms by creating distinctive sorts of ‘aesthetic spaces’. Crowther devotes chapter 4 to a complex and detailed discussion of the concept of aesthetic space. Put quite crudely (here, though not in the book), aesthetic space arises from the application the imagination to perception. Imagination is the human capacity to evoke ‘elsewheres’, something beyond what is given directly to perception. So the sense of the past, the sense of the future, and the sense of other aspects and dimensions of what is perceptually evident, these senses of elsewheres and elsewhens are all the products of imagination. Evoking elsewheres carries the sense of spontaneity, as in exercising the imagination one is not rigidly bound by what one perceives, and so by implication with a kind of withdrawal from a narrowly pragmatic attitude towards life, the ‘disinterestedness’ that Kant attributed to aesthetic judgments.

     If drawing and painting share all these features, how then do they differ? The differences turn unsurprisingly on the different ways in which marks are characteristically made in drawing and painting, and on the characteristically different effects. (pp. 63-68) Drawing uses a solid instrument, the immediate result of which is a dot or a line, and which in sustained use figures and patterns across the surface while leaving much of the surface unmarked. Painting deposits pigment, the immediate result of which is a colored area, and when sustained covers the surface and produces the ‘push/pull’ spatial dynamics mentioned above. Again, more startling are Crowther’s accounts of the distinctive metaphysical resonances of the two activities. Drawing carries the sense of the pressure that the instrument applies to the surface: “Always with drawing, there is the shadow of incision.” Crowther interprets this as immediately exemplifying “spirit’s breaking open of the physical to transform itself into a more public and enduring mode of expression.” (p. 66) By contrast, painting, in its juxtaposition of colored patches, bears a range of distinctive meanings, particularly a more evocative and complete sense of light than drawing permits. Painting’s heightening of the push/pull dimension of pictorial space “creates a level of virtual animation” [italics in the original] involving a sense of the ways in which animacy, the sense of being alive, pervades our world; and since we ourselves share in this life, painting evokes “a sense of the world answering back to our immersion in it, at the level of basic space-experience.” (p. 64, italics in the original).

     So on Crowther’s account drawing and painting are symbolic forms wherein someone exercises their imagination in marking a surface in such a way as to create an aesthetic space, which is in turn the object of intrinsic fascination and the occasion of a distinctive pleasure. In and through this imaginative activity the marker creates, expresses, and stabilizes for the perception of others a distinctive articulation of human beings’ relationship to the basic conditions of their existence, especially their existence as embodied, temporal, and spatial beings. Painting and drawing bear a range of metaphysical meanings, both in what they share and in their distinctiveness. In a maximal summary of this, Crowther goes so far as to say that drawing and painting “celebrate [all] this,” and that the marker’s aesthetic space “discloses the fecundity of spatial Being as such.” (p. 101) Having given his core accounts, Crowther goes on to discuss in successive chapters the metaphysical meanings that arise from the fact that drawings and paintings seem to stabilize the sense of a single moment apart from the marker’s constructive activity, the nature of abstract art, and the distinctive features of drawing and painting with computers. But the questions arise: How plausible and illuminating is Crowther’s account? How does it compare with competing accounts? And does it contribute to the clarification of the issues surrounded the ‘expanded media’ of Contemporary art? I will attempt to address these questions in the forthcoming second part of this blog post.

References:

Theodor Adorno, “Art and the Arts” (1967) in Can One Live after Auschwitz? (2003)

Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (1974)

Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (1944)

---The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 1 (1923)

Paul Crowther, What Drawing and Painting Really Mean: The Phenomenology of     Image and Gesture (2017)

Hans Hofmann, Search for the Real: and other essays (1967)

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790)

Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (1979) in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (1983)

Dominic McIver Lopes, Beyond Art (2014)

Kendall Walton, “Categories of Art” (1970) in Marvelous Images: On Values and the Arts (2008)

Varieties of Coherence: Two Pots by Nampeyo

         One of the most striking changes in thinking about the arts in the past half century has been the abandonment of framework of the so-called system of fine arts. Subject of a canonical account by the historian Paul O. Kristeller in the early 1950’s, the system of fine arts might be characterized as embodying the following claims: A. There are a small number of fine arts: poetry, music, painting, and sculpture; and perhaps also theater, dance, and architecture; and some additional, historical emergent arts, such as photography and film. B. The fine arts are to be distinguished from everyday artifacts on the one hand, and the applied arts on the other. The applied arts include an indefinitely large number of artistic practices, including ceramics, textiles and their various manners of decoration, and landscape architecture. C. The fine arts are the paradigmatic arts, the only arts properly speaking. Everyday artifacts may have an artistic or aesthetic dimension, and the applied arts involve centrally involve function, everyday usage, and appreciation and, and in addition to the distal sensory access of sight and/or hearing that they share with the fine arts, the applied arts are also enjoyed through the non-distal or contact senses of taste, touch, and/or smell.

     Every aspect of this conception has been widely disputed and indeed rejected; and to my knowledge no contemporary thinker in philosophy, anthropology, or sociology would treat it as anything other than an historical curio. Still, the rejection of the conception of the fine arts does not as such provide an alternative. One of the questions that immediately arise is how to treat the so-called applied as art. Should we think, for example, that applied arts exhibit something of the same kinds of meaning and meaningfulness that are exhibited by fine arts such as painting? Does ceramics practiced as an art form exhibit representation, expression, semantic and symbolic density, and resonance? An opportunity for thinking about these questions is offered by the current (Spring 2021) show at the de Young Museum in San Francisco of the work of the Hopi-Tewa potter Nampeyo, who is widely viewed as the major Native American artistic ceramicist of the early twentieth-century.

Nampeyo was born around 1860, and died in 1942. By the very early twentieth-century she was widely viewed as perhaps the most skilled and accomplished Native American maker and decorator of ceramics. Her work was largely made for the tourist trade, and consisted of traditional forms, such as seed jars and bowls, which were decorated with original motifs, patterns, and over-all designs. Nampeyo said that in her earliest works her motifs drew freely from ones she had seen on shards from the much earlier Hopi village and archeological site of Sityatki; later her motifs were her own inventions. Some of these motifs are nonetheless readily identifiable as based upon traditional motifs of stylized spiders, bats, and, as in this exhibition, eagles. Although she made pots until the end of her life, by around 1920 she had abandoned decoration due to her failing eyesight. Since her pots are unsigned, the extent and limits of her oeuvre are impossible to determine; but many works, like those in this exhibition, from the end of the 19th century into the second decade of the 20th are securely attributed to her, both in their making and in their decoration.

     The four pots are seed jars, whose distinctive characteristics are a squat, wide, symmetrical vessel with a single large hole centered in the top. The major variation within the form is whether and what sort of neck is given, that is, whether the hole opens with a slight rise from the major upper contour, and so seems cut into the top, or whether with a more salient rise a more complex outside curve is created by having a longer rise of a convex neck form. Whether or not the pots have salient necks, Nampeyo arranges two major paired motifs symmetrically around the hole. The immediate effect of this is to introduce a canonical viewpoint from directly above the pot wherein the radiating symmetry is most salient. And so from the canonical viewpoint the lower part of the pot is unperceived as it curves rapidly downward under the occluding furthest width of the pot. To single-viewpoint vision the minimally necked pots are like the decorated undersides of upside down bowls that hover a short distance over the ground. By slight contrast, the pots with necks relieve something of the horizontality and squatness of the minimally necked ones, and so introduce a secondary viewpoint, or rather viewing area, from 3/4s to side-on, so that something of the particular proportions and complex curvature thereby introduced can be appreciated. In all cases the decorations seem very much applied to a solid monochromatic ground, usually brownish yellow, though here in one case whitish. Maintaining a sense of the continuity of the ground seems like a central imperative for Nampeyo, as she avoids any sense of the small-scale figure/ground reversals so common in world’s ceramic and textile decoration. Further, the seed jars here lack much sense of the ‘somatic resonance’, the sense of the pot as a metaphor for parts of the human body and the body as a whole, that Philip Rawson  in his book Ceramics sees as a pervasive dimension of the meaningfulness of the world’s pots.

     I think something of Nampeyo’s most distinctive artfulness can be seen in the differing treatments of the eagle motif on two of the pots.

Both pots exhibit short rises at the neck, so short as to be unemphatic and easily overlooked when seen from a medium-distance above. Both show four heraldic ‘tail-feather’ motifs radiating symmetrically from the centered hole, with symmetrically opposed curvilinear ‘claw’ elements between each tail-feather. In both cases the claws come close to, but do not touch, any other decorative element, so the sense of the yellow ground as continuous underneath them is maintained. The particularities of the tail-feathers in particular differ: in the upper space one has a fretted swastika, the other a complex polygon whose angularity suggests a homeland in textile decoration. A mesh of cross-hatchings surround both of these sub-motifs.

     On the account of Hopi-Tewa ceramic design given in Mary Ellen Blair’s The Legacy of a master potter: Nampeyo and her descendants (1999), all of these characteristics fit comfortably within the practice of Nampeyo as well as other potters. Among those working within this cross-generational stylistic set, Nampeyo stood out for her technical abilities, the fertility of her decorative imagination, and the precision of her marks, all of which were made with only her hands themselves as measures and guides. But perhaps something of her distinctive sensibility can be seen in her variations with borders and colored fields. As noted above, Nampeyo never encloses the yellow ground within a figure so as to render ambiguous whether the internal yellow is part of the field or the local color of a motif. The prima facie counter-example to this in the pot with the swastika is within the square with curved sides that surrounds the top hole.

 Nampeyo drew a border at the edge of the eagle designs of three lines, the outer two thin black lines, the inner one a somewhat thicker red. But there is no ambiguity: this bordering transforms the unworked yellow ground into an internal color of the square, as if the corners of a yellow cloth are coming out of the hole and draping the pot. Now this transforming treatment of the ground is further articulated in two ways. First, in contrast with the other pot, Nampeyo has not drawn a bottom border, thereby relatively intensifying the sense of the continuity of the yellow. The field yellow is experienced as underlying the yellow of the square. Second, Nampeyo gives the area in the tail-motif that is below the swastika and above the ‘feathers’ a light red wash, thereby eliminating the possibility of seeing the yellow within the eagle motif as ambiguous between field and figure. These three treatments conspire to maintain the strong sense of the so to speak initial integrity of the pot as a simple unity.

     By contrast, the other pot with the eagle motif shows an inversion of each of these treatments.

In the latter pot, an emphatic bottom bordering is given with two black lines, one thin and one so thick that it hovers between being a line and being a plane. Second, the top curvilinear square is given a darkish red wash, the effect of which is to eliminate the sense of the square as emerging from the whole; rather the square seems to sit on the surface, and the blackness of the whole is recruited into a surface decoration. Third, the inner structure of the eagle motif is worked so that the issue of an interior plane does not arise; and roughly where the red wash was placed on the first pot Nampeyo has used the darkish red to create a rectilinear element that communicates with the internal markings of the tail feathers. With the second pot Nampeyo has not just integrated, but also so to speak localized all of the decorative elements over against the ground; the decorations cohere as a kind of textile-like ensemble laid over the relatively weak continuity of the yellow ground.

     So, to the extent that one wishes to find a distinctive individual sensibility in Nampeyo’s work, perhaps one needs to look at the play of elements across a range of her work, and consider the particular realizations, work by work, of the relations between, on the one hand, bordering or the lack thereof, and, on the other, the internal articulations of the motifs. Perhaps what is most distinctively Nampeyo’s is the search for novel kinds of coherence.

References:

 Mary Ellen Blair, The Legacy of a master potter: Nampeyo and her descendants (1999)

Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts” (1951, 1952) in Renaissance Thought and the Arts (1990)

Philip Rawson, Ceramics (1971)

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.