Critical Review of Sherri Irvin’s Immaterial (2022), Part 3: Up from Ontology

    In my previous two blog posts I have considered Sherri Irvin’s recent book on rules in contemporary art. Again, Irvin draws attention to the prominence in the contemporary visual arts of what she calls custom rules, which are directions explicitly given by an artist as to how their artwork should be presented, conserved, and engaged with. Irvin argues that in many works of contemporary art such rules are parts of the artistic medium that embodies the works, and that the typical uses of such rules are ontological, in that they determine what counts as the work, what its salient features are, and/or the ways, if any, the work may be altered while remaining the same work. She considers her own investigation as itself an instance of the ontology of art, which in her view largely consists of empirical investigations and explications of the various kinds of and historically changing characteristics of different art forms. At the end of my second post I suggested that such an approach can only plausibly be considered fruitful under an impoverished and distorted conception of contemporary visual art. Given the evident intelligence, seriousness, and care in explication displayed throughout the book, how is that possible?

     In this brief concluding reflection, I’ll raise questions on two points central to her account: the basic claim of ontology to read off characteristics of artworks from entrenched practices of making, artistic engagement, and (particularly important to Irvin) conservation; and the role of function in establishing the object of ontological investigation. I don’t think that Irvin’s assumptions and claims on these points are individually disastrous, but taken together they offer a flattened and two-dimensional picture of contemporary visual art that prevents her account from being fruitful in understanding and appreciating a broad range of contemporary visual art.

     Preliminary to this, I note Irvin’s explicit remarks about the custom rules with regard to contemporary visual art as a whole. Early on in the book she presents a series of explicit ‘disclaimers’ (pp. 7-9) in a dismayingly smart-aleck style, for example beginning with: “What do I mean by “contemporary”? I don’t care very much about the specific details of the definition. There is some art that I want to talk about, and I’m going to slap the label “contemporary art” on it because that’s a label other people tend to slap on it.” Etc. (p. 7) She goes on to note that her examples are mostly from the 1980s onward, though she includes discussion of pieces as early as 1960. She then states that “I’m not talking about all art made these days. How could I? I focus on art that is linked to the international network of contemporary art galleries, museums, and biennials” (ibid). And further: “I am a philosopher, so this is a philosophy of contemporary art, not a history” (p. 8). One might suspect that these two disclaimers coalesce in motivating an image of a quite historically recent and partial institutional complex as an ahistorical topic of ontological investigation. History does enter Irvin’s account in three ways: First, as noted previously, she does argue that the use of custom rules emerges out of the very long-term exercise of (unarticulated) conventions providing default rules of making, display, and engagement. Second, again previously noted, she justifies the claim that the custom rules inherit and fulfill the functions traditionally fulfilled by artistic media. And third, (here I introduce a new point) she follows the philosopher Guy Rohrbaugh in thinking that artworks generally have a particular ontological identity as historical individuals (p. 118), which she explicates as claiming that artworks are individuals (whether types or tokens) that are dependent upon their material instantiation. Such instantiation is an historical event, and so, contra some alternative accounts, artworks are not timeless entities. Still, all three of these senses together amount to an etiolated conception of artistic history that involves no periods, no movements, no genres, and no traditions. Irvin insists that the use of custom rules is ‘sufficiently’ well-established to alter the ontology of contemporary visual art generally, but offers no reflections of what sort of criteria govern the judgment of ‘sufficiency’.

     Question #1: What is a practice?—Irvin, and with her the recent tradition in the analytic ontology of art exemplified most prominently in essays by Amie Thomasson, claim that ontology is explicated from the objects given in stable practices. What sort of practices? In introducing the ‘pragmatic constraint’ (on which see my earlier two posts) Irvin cites David Davies stipulating that artworks “must be entities that can bear the sorts of properties rightly ascribed to what are termed ‘works in our reflective critical and appreciative practice,” and she immediately states that by contrast she “privilege[s] the practices of art creation, conservation, and curation that are centrally concerned with the artwork’s identity and persistence conditions.” (p. 24) Note that in shifting the topic from Davies’s formulation, Irvin silently drops the word ‘rightly’. Davies’s formulation leaves open the conceptual possibility that prevailing practices in many instances might ‘wrongly’ ascribe prima facie certain properties. Similarly, in an essay cited by Irvin, though in a passage Irvin does not discuss, the philosopher of art Dominic McIver Lopes likewise commits himself to the pragmatic constraint, with the qualification that sometimes “an ontology of art leads us to revise our appreciative practices; but if, upon reflection, our appreciative practices are sound, then they furnish materials for a good ontology of art.” As with Davies’s reference to ‘rightly’, Lopes’s use of the term ‘sound’ holds open the possibility of a gap between prevailing unsound practices and conceptions embedded in ‘sound’ practices that may need to be uncovered or indeed created. In Irvin’s account practices are patterned regularities of social action, but lack any further structure or determinations; Irvin is unconcerned with how practices are learned, what sorts of goods are internal to practices, and whether and how practices have internal goals (that is, all the points that the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre influentially characterized as central to practices in his After Virtue). In passing over distinctions between right and wrong ascriptions, and unsound and sound practices, Irvin loses the possibility of critical reflection upon prevailing practices in contemporary visual art, at least to the extent that she adheres to ontological investigations. (A couple of decades ago I offered a similar criticism of Joseph Margolis’s conception of practice in a review of his book What, After All, is a Work of Art? (see Rapko (2000). I cannot pursue this criticism in this context; for some further discussion of artistic practices in contemporary visual art see the second chapter of my book Return to Darkness, forthcoming in Spanish from the Universidad de los Andes press). For Irvin, practice proposes and ontology disposes; no further questions are permitted.

     Question #2: What is an artistic function?—So far I have discussed Irvin as an ontologist, but this is a partial simplification of her explicit statements. Again citing Guy Rohrbaugh, she writes that her “ontological theorizing about contemporary art is an exercise in social metaphysics: offering an account of a kind of thing that is constructed by people and plays a role in the social practices of a community” (p. 22). In particular, the variety of social metaphysics she pursues is that influentially developed by the philosopher John Searle in two books. Claiming to summarize Searle, she proposes that through its practices communities construct things that meet their needs and ‘perform functions’ (p. 23). Such functions are first of all what Searle calls ‘status functions’ that communities assign to particulars, as in ‘this rock is a boundary marker’, or, more pointedly in this context, ‘this object is a work of art’. On such an account the relevant function of the rock is evident: it marks the boundary between two regions, and so plays whatever further roles are required in whatever organized activities there are regulating the relations between the two areas. But what function does a work of art have, and what associated roles does it play? Searle’s own answer would seem to be that the question is misguided, in that he says that there are what he calls general human activities (such as religion, literature, and (presumably) visual art) that do not qua general activities have assigned status functions, though these activities are taken up, institutionalized, and elaborated in particular forms by communities. But Irvin elides Searle’s reference to general human activities, and simply says that the contemporary ‘community’ of galleries and museums assigns art status to certain objects, and that in turn the functional role of such objects, at least as far as social metaphysics and ontology is concerned, is simply to supply objects to galleries and museums. As she flatly puts it, a contemporary work of visual art “is a thing that is displayed, that audience members respond to, that may be restored and conserved, and that may be collected.” (p. 27) The triteness of this declaration gives one pause. Here the elision of the gap between art as a general human activity and the particular form it takes in the contemporary world, and in addition restricting consideration of its contemporary forms to those prominently at home in galleries and museum is of a piece with her flat, non-teleological conception of practice (discussed above); all these conflations conspire to eliminate the possibility of critical reflection on the various aims pursued in contemporary visual art and a fortiori reflection upon the character and legitimacy of those aims.

     Now, Irvin might reply to these criticisms with a shrug of the shoulders and simply note that they are not so much criticisms of her particular claims, but are merely ways of saying that one doesn’t find the ontology of art a promising or interesting way of investigating and reflecting upon central features of contemporary visual art. But that is not the core aim of social ontology, which rather treats even-handedly the entities of the social world and analyzes them as variations on the type-token distinction and having whatever conditions of identity, characteristics, and modalities they happen to have. One might grant Irvin’s point, but still insist that her way of framing the issue misses, indeed occludes, central aspects of her topic. To see this, consider again her focal concept of custom rules. Irvin asserts that the prominence in contemporary visual art of works partially or wholly constituted by custom rules alters the very ontology of contemporary art. But when and why are artists motivated to use custom rules? The book opens with a section called ‘Pranking Painting’ (pp. 1-7) wherein Irving briefly introduces four paintings or series of paintings that are seemingly accompanied by custom rules, including Georg Baselitz’s well-known upside down paintings, and other works that are displayed facing a wall, or painted in such a way that their surfaces will erode and peel away. Irvin cites a single instance of a series of works that is prima facie in an established artform, Gerald Ferguson’s Maintenance Paintings (1979-82), monochrome canvases that an ‘end user’ is invited to re-paint in a different color if she feels they would so ‘look better’. It does not strike me that these works are well understood as members of an artistic sub-genre consisting of paintings-and-custom-rules. Rather, Baselitz’s oeuvre is of paintings displayed with a signature gimmick; the paintings facing a wall and Ferguson’s monochromes are instances of conceptual art that use paintings to make statements; and the peeling works are familiar instances of late modernist works that aim to emphasize a dimension of the metaphor painting (or artwork)-as-material-object. And beyond her brief discussion of paintings, Irvin neglects the otherwise salient point that custom rules are applied typically in works that prominently consist of non-traditional artistic materials: candies; piles of sugar; a cube of chocolate; bottle tops; etc. The use of such materials does not invoke default conditions of display, conservation, and engagement, perhaps beyond the old taboo that one ought not touch or otherwise interfere with a displayed artifact. One might think that the use of custom rules is motivated by the artist’s interest in maximizing the meaningfulness of works that constitutively involve non-traditional materials. The question then arises: why are so many artists motivated to put such materials to artistic uses? But to answer that question, one must consider the actual history of contemporary art, as it emerged in the hands of Claes Oldenburg, Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Robert Smithson, Nam June Paik, and others. Such an investigation is ineliminably historical and concerned with the aims of the artists. The philosophical practice of ontology, shorn of history and teleology as it is in Irvin’s hands, can offer no illumination as to why anyone would so much as be concerned with its object of investigation.

References:

David Davies, Art as Performance (2004)

Sherri Irvin, ‘The Artist’s Sanction in Contemporary Art.’ (2005) Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63 (4)

-----Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art (2022)

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981)

Dominic McIver Lopes, ‘Shikinen Sengu and the Ontology of Architecture in Japan.’ (2007) Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65 (1)

Joseph Margolis, What, After All, is a Work of Art? (1999)

John Rapko, ‘Review of Margolis.’ (2000) Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

-----Return to Darkness (2022)

Guy Rohrbaugh, ‘Artworks as Historical Individuals.’ (2003) European Journal of Philosophy 11 (2): 177-205

-----‘Must Ontological Pragmatism be Self-Defeating?’ (2012) in Art and Abstract Objects, Christy Mag Uiduir (ed)

John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (1995)

-----Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (2010)

Amie Thomasson, ‘The Ontology of Art’ (2004) in Blackwell ed. Peter Kivy

-----‘The Ontology of Art and Knowledge in Aesthetics’ (2005). Journal of Aeshetics and Art Criticism

-----‘Ontological Innovation in Art.’ (2010) Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68

Critical Notice of Sherri Irvin’s Immaterial, Part 2: From Ontological Problems to Problems with Ontology

     In my previous post I summarized the philosopher Sherri Irvin’s account of the concept of the ‘artist’s sanction’ and her recently published book Immaterial that gives an account of a phenomenon distinctive of prominent instances of contemporary visual art: an explicit artist’s sanction in the form of custom rules forms part of the content of many contemporary artworks. The book advances four major claims about such custom rules: 1. Their role in contemporary visual artworks is primarily ontological, in the sense that they specify the boundaries of the artwork and/or essential features of the work and/or which if any parts of the work may be replaced without the work being substantively altered or destroyed. 2. Custom rules cluster around three aspects of contemporary visual artworks: how the works may be displayed; whether and how the works may be conserved; how one may participate in or engage with the work, beyond the default condition of visual art that the work should be looked at. 3. Contemporary visual artworks that feature custom rules as part of their content are indeed works of art, in that the rules are part or the whole of the works’ artistic medium, as evidenced by the fact that the uses of such rules share central characteristics with and for the most part fulfill the same functions as the uses of artistic media in traditional and modern artworks. 4. The artistic use of custom rules lends itself in an especially apt and intimate way to two prominent topics addressed in contemporary visual art: finitude (especially as figuring in decay) and social or political resistance or protest by oppressed or marginalized groups and peoples.

     In this post I interrogate the first claim, that concerning the allegedly ontological role of custom rules in contemporary visual art, as well as Irvin’s explicit methodological commitments that motivate her particular approach to custom rules. Her discussion of methodology occupies a small part of the book (pages 22-37), and has something of a free-standing quality, in that, having stated there the reasons for her methodological choices, she proceeds for the rest of the book without any further such reflection and with no references back to that discussion. As explicitly stated, her methodology and the philosophical commitments it expresses are as follows: 1. The book is an exercise in “an exercise in social metaphysics” in “offering an account of a kind of thing that is constructed by people and plays a role in the social practices of a community.” (p. 22) 2. She follows the conception of social ontology offered in two prominent books by the philosopher John Searle in treating contemporary visual artworks as institutional facts that possess a ‘status function’ assigned collectively by “community conventions, practices, or agreement.” (ibid.) 3. The topic of the book is not anything and everything that might be reasonably considered contemporary art—she explicitly excludes street art and contemporary dance--, but only the art that is the concern of the community whose central members are “[visual?] artists and museum professionals.” This contemporary art community and its practices are “divergent, contested, and influx,” but nonetheless “sufficiently robust to allow us to define the functional role of the contemporary artwork.” (p. 24). 4. The ‘status function’ assigned by this particular community is (I take it) ‘being a work of (contemporary visual) art’. What roles are distinctive of that status function can only be discovered by empirical investigation. (p. 25) Such investigation reveals that “the most basic and fundamental aspects of the functional artwork-role” are the following: “The work is created by one or more artists. It is presented for audience members to encounter, perhaps on multiple distinct occasions; these audience members, including critics and members of the public, experience it and respond to it. Frequently, it is the object of restoration and conservation efforts. Frequently, it is the sort of thing that a museum may collect.” (p. 27)

     One set of questions that suggest themselves about Irvin’s account concern the very idea of a social ontology, and of an ontology of art in particular. The ontology of art is a prominent topic in analytic aesthetics of the past two decades, and whose roots go back to many of the major works in the philosophy of art of the 20th century. Standard accounts (as given implicitly or explicitly in works such as Kraut (2007), Lopes (2007), Rohrbaugh (2003), and Thomasson (2004)) cite early instances of the ontology of art in R. G. Collingwood’s claim that works of art are fundamentally instances of self-expression and Jean-Paul Sartre’s claim that works of art are fundamentally imaginary. A cautionary note is often struck with regard to Nelson Goodman’s claim that a performance of a piece of written music that contains a single wrong note is not a genuine instance of the piece; this is regularly cited as an attempt at ‘radical revision’, kind of ontology of art gone mad, that violates our basic intuitions and practices concerning what counts as a (genuine) piece of art. Accordingly, there is in recent writing broad acceptance of what the philosopher David Davies called ‘the pragmatic constraint’ that ontologies of art must treat as fundamental the works bearing the properties rightly ascribed to them in our reflective practices of art criticism and appreciation. Irvin explicitly endorses this, while adding that her focus is more on “practices of art creation, conservation, and curation” (p. 24)). More generally, the ontology of art attempts to uncover the identity-constituting properties of artworks, and then places those entities and their properties among a broader field of entities including other artifacts, thoughts, and material objects. Much of the recent work acknowledges that different kinds of artworks embody different ontologies, and that these differing ontologies can be grasped in terms of differing specifications of the type-token distinction. So, for example, a traditional painting is fundamentally a token, while a poem or a written musical work is a type with multiple realizations or instances. Irvin again follows this in claiming that contemporary works of visual art that feature custom rules as part of their content have a different ontology than works of street art or dance.

     Now, one might follow along with the project of uncovering and analyzing the ontology of contemporary visual artworks, but still raise the question why and whether this is a potentially fruitful way of thinking about art. What illumination might such an approach offer? Irvin’s core claim is that the custom rules in many instances of contemporary visual artworks are constitutive; as she puts it, “The rules [in particular the custom rules] of contemporary art constitute artworks and the practices of displaying them; they also regulate how installers, curators, conservators, and audience members should engage with the works.” (p 33) So we are to think that we cannot begin the activity of understanding and appreciating these works until we know what the works are, on pain of otherwise failing to attach our responses to the very things to which we are attempting to respond. But Irvin’s central claim, and with it her approach generally, are only plausible under a massively truncated conception of contemporary art and its practices. Or so I shall claim and argue in the forthcoming third and final part of this review.

References:

R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (1938)

David Davies, Art as Performance (2004)

Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (1968)

Sherri Irvin, Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art (2022)

Robert Kraut, Artworld Metaphysics (2007)

Dominic McIver Lopes, ‘Shikinen Sengu and the Ontology of Architecture in Japan.’ (2007) Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65 (1)

Guy Rohrbaugh, ‘Artworks as Historical Individuals.’ (2003) European Journal of Philosophy 11 (2): 177-205

Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary (1940)

John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (1995)

-----Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (2010)

Amie Thomasson, ‘The Ontology of Art’ (2004) in The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, ed. Peter Kivy

Critical Review: Sherri Irvin, Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art (2022)--Part One:

     Contemporary visual art has attracted little attention from Anglo-American philosophers working the in analytic tradition. Starting with a path-breaking article by Timothy Binkley in the 1970s, most of the little writing there is in analytic aesthetics on recent visual art has addressed the challenges to understanding posed by conceptual art, signaled initially by Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and then efflorescing around 1970 in works by Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Robert Barry, and other artists. The challenge stems from the fact that such works seem to arise within the tradition of Western visual art, but that the works’ visual aspects, what the works offer to visual inspection, is either in some sense inessential to the work, or even non-existent, in that the works primarily exist as a thought-experiment, or a set of instructions, or some proposal, all of which may not even be embodied or realized in some material artifact. Since for the most part philosophers have accepted that such proffered works are indeed works of art, a major topic has been whether and in what sense such conceptual works possess or make use of an artistic medium. If the medium of, say, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is oil paint and canvas, then is the medium of a work of conceptual thought, or language, or rules? Or, alternatively, are conceptual works of (visual) art instances of a novel genre of (visual) art whose members lack media? Or should one conceptualize instances of conceptual art in terms of the type-token distinction, where the works are sui generis types whose tokens may or may not exist?

     In a paper published in 2005 the philosopher Sherri Irvin drew attention to a different aspect of contemporary visual art, the newly prominent fact of a great many artworks that are presented along with explicit instructions for novel ways in which they must be displayed, conserved, or encountered. In that paper Irvin’s main example is a work by the Canadian artist Liz Magor entitled Time and Mrs. Tiber that consists of a display of jars of preserves together with some recipes for preservation. Shortly after the work was acquired by the National Gallery of Canada a number of the jars developed a mold and then were discovered to be infected with botulism; as a health hazard, the infected jars were then destroyed. Considering Magor’s changing instructions on whether and how the jars may be preserved or replaced, Irvin introduces the concept of the ‘artist’s sanction’, a public aspect of the artist’s intentionality in making a work. The artist’s sanction is manifest in an artist’s enacted decision to display a particular work in a certain kind of context. So initially Magor specified that the infected jars be destroyed, with the consequence that the work too would destroyed; this was consistent with her claim that the work was ‘about’ the impossibility of preserving things. Later Magor changed her mind and accordingly recreated the infected jars, while specifying that when the jars, and so the work as a whole, could no longer be displayed they be kept for study. In changing her instructions for conservation, Magor changed her conception of what the work consisted in, and so altered what she had sanctioned. The role of an artist’s sanction in the practices of art is fundamentally ontological: the sanction specifies the boundaries of the work, fixes fundamental features of the work, and specifies the genre to which the work belongs. The artist’s sanction constrains, though does not determine, any serious interpretation of an artwork. In much of the world’s art, the artist’s sanction is implicit in the work as typically displayed; a painting hung in a gallery is defined by its borders, it may not be touched, its offers features for visual inspection, some of its salient features place it within a genre, the work should be preserved so as to maintain its visual appearance indefinitely, and so forth. Irvin suggests that recognition of the artistic role of the sanction is particularly important with regard to many works of contemporary art, in that in many cases a contemporary work of visual art consists not only of a material artifact placed in standard conditions of display, but also includes the artist’s specification of special, non-traditional instructions for how the work must be experienced.

     In her new book Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art, Irvin calls such non-traditional instructions custom rules. The book as a whole is first of all an exploration of ontology of contemporary artworks that feature such custom rules, and additionally the range of types of such rules, and the ways in which the prominence of such works alters contemporary gallery- and museum-based visual art as a whole, and finally the topics to which works with custom rules address in especially apt ways. Irvin discusses a range of non-traditional contemporary works, but her most central example now is Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s celebrated “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), which consists of 175 pounds (the weight of Gonzalez-Torres’s beloved Ross) of hard candies piled up against a wall. In a paradigmatic instance of a custom rules, the artist instructs viewers not just to look, but also to take a piece and eat it; and he further instructs the institution displaying the piece to replenish the work daily. Irvin thinks that such works featuring custom rules as part of their content are so widespread and well-established in contemporary visual art that their existence marks the ontology of contemporary artworks generally, in that what hitherto had been default conventions of display, such as that the work should not be touched, are now variables (139-40) and experienced as options. So a contemporary artist must as a matter of conceptual necessity decide whether the work should be touched or untouched, altered by the viewer or left unaltered, gnawed upon or not.

      Irvin proceeds as follows: Having alerted the reader to the prominence of custom rules in contemporary visual art, she notes that custom rules typically apply to one or the other of three ontological aspects of an artwork: to the non-traditional conditions under which the work may be displayed (as with works by the artist El Anatsui where the manner of display of his large blankets of flattened and wired together bottle caps is left to the host institution); to the ways in which the work may or may not be conserved (as with the specific instructions on whether to preserve or replace banana skins in a work by Zoe Leonard); and with strictures on whether and how the viewer might participate or interact with the work (as in Gonzalez-Torres’s instruction to take and eat a piece of candy).

     Having devoted a chapter to each of these kinds of custom rules, Irvin raises the issue: are artworks that constitutively feature custom rules a new and sui generis kind of art, or are they continuous with and a development of earlier kinds of art? Irvin argues for the latter option by focusing on the characteristic functions of an artistic medium. Irvin characterizes the medium of a work of (visual) art as “a system comprising both [a physical] support and a set of conventions and practices for deploying that support.” (128) Artistic media prominently display five characteristics: “First, medium-specific conventions may set the boundaries of he artwork, or identify which aspects of a presented object are eligible for appreciation . . . Second, medium helps to structure artists’ choices . . . Third, and relatedly, medium plays a role in our explanations of the work’s features and their relationships to each other. . . Fourth, medium structures how we attribute meaning to the artwork’s elements . . . Fifth, medium-specific conventions and practices establish what is normal and expected within the medium”. (129-31) Irvin accordingly argues that the use of custom rules in contemporary art also displays these characteristics. Of particular importance is her account of how the use of custom rules fits the fourth point concerning how an artistic media structures the viewer’s attribution of meaning to a work’s elements. In addition to making salient what will count as a basic feature of the work and the primitive meaning the feature carries—recall Gonzalez-Torres’s stipulation about the total weight of the candies--, custom rules, just by virtue of the fact that they are custom and so non-traditional and in violation of hitherto implicit default conventions, can “be expressive by butting up against constraints on what is normally understood as feasible or reasonable to demand or permit”. (144) This explains, so Irvin argues, why works with custom rules are so frequently a part of contemporary political art, as such works themselves exemplify something of the resistance to convention that is also part of such works’ subject matter. Another characteristic topic of works containing custom rules is finitude, especially as part of works addressing decay and death. The use of non-traditional materials subject to decay, such as again Leonard’s banana peels, permits such works to exemplify the very subject that they are about.

     Irvin’s book is a rare, perhaps unique, instance of a serious work of Anglo-American analytic philosophy of art that focally addresses something characteristic of contemporary visual art. This is a book of dense yet clear argumentation and that additionally displays a masterful command of recent work in the analytic philosophy of art. Inevitably questions arise: is the approach to contemporary visual art through its so-called ontology a coherent and fruitful enterprise? What fuller characterization of contemporary visual art does Irvin presuppose, and is that characterization plausible and comprehensive? Does the widespread use of custom rules in contemporary visual art have the characteristics and consequences that Irvin claims? I turn to these critical questions in my next blog post.

References:

Timothy Binkley, ‘Piece: Contra Aesthetics’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (Vol. 35, No. 3 (Spring, 1977))

Sherri Irvin, ‘The Artist’s Sanction in Contemporary Art”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (Vol. 63, No 4 (Autumn, 2005))

----Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art (2022)

On Ben Davis, Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis and Cultural Strategy (2022)

     First in the 1950s, and then in many books and articles in the next three decades, the great Marxist literary and cultural critic Raymond Williams used the term ‘structures of feeling’ as part of an attempt to describe kinds of social phenomena that were distinctive of a social period but were not well captured in institutional analysis or ideology critique. As he put it towards the end of his life, the ascription of a structure of feeling is a ‘cultural hypothesis’ aiming to capture the sense of a ‘change in presence’ in a culture. They are ‘structures’ in that there are usually multiple, connected phenomena at play; and they are ‘feelings’ in that the phenomena lack the determinate character of articulate thoughts, but rather concern the sense of how lives are actually lived, and how it ‘feels’ to be alive and active at a certain period. Williams acknowledged the vagueness of the term, but nonetheless reasonably considered something like it essential to cultural analysis, though always in the context of a fuller account that included the means and relations of production in a society, along with its institutions and practices, both dominant and marginal. (Williams 1977 pp. 128-32, and 1981)  In his new book the art critic Ben Davis, with explicit reference to Williams, has set himself the task of describing and evaluating the structure of feeling characteristic of the last decade, particularly with regard to the visual arts. Like Williams, Davis identifies himself as a Marxist, and likewise includes in his analyses one of the most attractive aspects of Marxist thinking, what the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre called “the whole Marxist attempt to envisage societies from the standpoint of their openness to the future, of the possibilities of development inherent in them.” (MacIntyre 1968, p. 142) Here this aspect of Marxism takes the form of suggesting ways of resolving or superseding fraught tensions within our most recent structure of feeling.

     In the book’s Introduction Davis considers three factors responsible for our most recent structure of feeling. (pp. 2-5) One is the intensification of economic inequality in the wake of the recovery from the downturn of 2008. In the social sphere including the visual arts this led to inflation of prices of artworks as signals of luxury consumption and museum’s increasing reliance upon the uncertain largesse of the super-wealthy. A second factor the omnipresence of digital culture and social media. In the arts this leads to the intensification of interest in works that are ‘relevant’ in the sense of inducing transient spikes in public interest. More fundamentally, it leads to what Davis calls ‘context collapse’, whereby works of art no longer gain any durable meaning as a result of being in a stable space, such as a museum or private residence, but instead undergo an uncontrollable process of gaining meaning and significance “as they circulate among dispersed and unpredictable audiences.” (p. 3) A third factor, partially overlapping with the second, is the rise of Black Lives Matter and other new social movements that gain physiognomies in part as elements of a “digital activist culture.” (p. 4) Because of the broad sense of immediacy and urgency attached to these movements, the new structure of feeling includes the sense that ‘aesthetic experience’ (and so presumably the visual arts) are “being both overshadowed by the spectacle of current events and pressed into new connection them.” (p. 5)

     The first chapter, ‘Connoisseurship and Critique’, treats Giovanni Morelli, the nineteenth-century founder of the practice of scientific connoisseurship, as an exemplary figure in the modern arts in allegedly elitist celebrating the artistic personality that produces and is expressed in a work of art. The modern counter-figure to the connoisseur is the consumer, a shadowy figure whose characteristic activities are of the type of someone “looking for something suitably distracting while grazing on Netflix.” (p. 25) The typical objects of the connoisseur are works of fine art, while those of the consumer are the industrialized products of commodity culture. But each figure might take up the characteristic objects of the other: the connoisseur might, in the manner pioneered by the film critic Andrew Sarris, treat a body of Hollywood B-movies as an oeuvre, as expressions of the distinctive style and concerns of the director; and works of fine art such as the Mona Lisa, might become icons of popular media. But while these opposed figures and objects maintained through the modern period some degree of conceptual, social, and institutional distinctiveness, Davis suggests that what “seems characteristic of the recent moment is the intensification of the confusion between the different positions.” (p. 26)

      Most of the pages of the book’s succeeding eight chapters are devoted to the broader cultural phenomena that crystallize the most recent structure of feeling, such as the uses of social media in the service of political activism, the uses of the technologies of artificial intelligence for making art and pornography, and the struggles of art museums to attract large audiences by staging media events. Each chapter has dozens of footnotes, most citing pieces of journalism, articles, or books on very recent social phenomena. In each chapter there is a wealth of detail that makes summarizing Davis’s accounts difficult, yet there is also a repetitive drum-beat of the larger claims that Davis make. Davis’s repeatedly makes, or at least alludes to, four claims: 1. The phenomena and the associated controversies Davis discusses are ultimately matters of taste: Should one admire or condemn Dana Schutz’s painting of the corpse of Emmet Till? Should one celebrate cultural appropriation as a key element of a democratic culture, or condemn it as a crypto-imperialist enterprise of profiting from the work of marginalized peoples? 2. Since the cultural phenomena discussed make up part of the most recent structure of feeling, they do not so to speak legislate their own uses. Artificial intelligence, social media, and so forth can be put to different ends, in the service of celebration or critique, of conservatism or reform or revolution. 3. Because the phenomena discussed are primarily matters of taste and so matters of aesthetics, they are simultaneously not primarily political matters; consequently concern with the features of the structure of feeling is at the very least “always in danger of redirecting political questions into questions of taste.” (p. 27) 4. So instead of concerning ourselves with the futile attempt to decide between one or the other of the warring sides surrounding these cultural phenomena, we should instead work politically to create a more just world wherein these cultural phenomena, discussed herein in great detail, lose their centrality and importance in our lives.

     An interesting part of the book, so far unmentioned, is that Davis frames the body of his book with two visions of the cultural future. The book opens with a dystopian account, purportedly from the year 2037, of the situation of contemporary art. The dystopia is our future, if our future is unmarked by a radical break with the present, and the phenomena of our current structure of feeling are sedimented in human life. This is the dystopia of conspicuous consumption for wealthy elites and mindless entertainment for the plebes, but still with a subterranean world of dissident artists inventing new secret art forms. The book concludes with the utopian vision of an account of culture ten years after the success of a revolution that overthrew capitalism, something that would happen if all the political work urged in point 4 above coalesced and succeeded. In the post-capitalist world there is much to grieve, and so a major part of the arts aims to memorialize and reconcile. Additionally there are a new localism and new forms of celebration.

     There is much to be learned from Davis’s book, particularly if one is interested in social media and transient controversies, and one’s computer has not been working for the last decade. Still, the book is disappointing for two major reasons. One basic problem is that so to speak theory and topic pass each other by. The theory is a fairly standard kind of smoothed-over Marxist account wherein cultural phenomena are treated as derivative of more basic economic phenomena, in particular of class. The book’s explicit topic, our most recent structure of feeling, lacks substance, as if it were a kind of froth on the surface of economic and political life. What’s missing, it seems to me, is the sort of account that Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello gave in The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005), where they analyze contemporary social change under the twin perspectives of social critique and aesthetic critique, each rooted in durable attitudes, ideologies, and institutions, and each taking new forms in the most recent phase of capitalism that emerges in the 1970s. Similarly, as noted in the introduction above, Raymond Williams did not treat structures of feeling as a kind of free-standing social element, but rather as a historically varying aspect of social life to be grasped in the context of more durable social forms, institutions, ideologies, and practices.

     A second disappointment stems from Davis’s title, Art in the After-Culture. There is in fact very little on art in the book. Several chapters barely mention art, and the longest discussions are not of art or artists, but rather of media events like the controversy surrounding Schutz’s painting or the uses of the image of the Mona Lisa. The most extended discussion of a work of art in the entire 227 pages of text is a single paragraph on Christian Marclay’s celebrated piece The Clock. It is perhaps indicative of our contemporary structure of feeling, in a manner unrecognized by Davis, that one might write a book on art that contains no sustained discussion of art.

__________________________________

References:

Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005)

Ben Davis, Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis and Cultural Strategy (2022)

Alasdair MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity (1968)

Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (1977)

-----Culture (1981)

Poussin as an Ontologist? Part 3: The Dissolution and After-Life of a Conception

     In my previous posts I pursued the suggestion that at least some instances of visual art have philosophical implications. Specifically, I considered a claim from the art historian Philip Rawson, that Poussin’s works exhibited a distinctive ‘visual ontology’, in light of drawings shown at the exhibition ‘Poussin and the Dance’ currently at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. One way of making sense of Rawson’s claim would be, so I have suggested, be taking two steps: first, to adopt something like R. G. Collingwood’s idea that metaphysics comprises the sustained examination of presuppositions. For Collingwood a presupposition is the question to which everyday statements are the answer; and there are again two sorts of presuppositions: relative presuppositions, which are themselves answers to prior questions, and absolute presuppositions, that are basic, albeit historically changing, features of cognition and that are not themselves answers to questions. So in everyday cognition a relative presupposition might be something like ‘What kind of thing is that object?’, while an absolute presupposition might be something like ‘Objects are spatio-temporally determinate entities subject to causality’. Second, one might treat the collection of basic artistic conceptions in an artist as constituting a partial specification of a system of absolute presuppositions. So, following Oskar Bätschmann, one could treat Poussin’s drawings as arising from a limited set of graphic forms and processes—the use of pen for outlining and washes for shadow--, together with a set of basic conceptions of entities—objects as delimited (by pen strokes), articulated by light (unworked areas) and shadows (washed areas), against a positive ground of light (unworked paper), etc. And then one could treat stylistic consistency as a visual analogue of sustained metaphysical thought.

     One might reject this whole enterprise by claiming that one finds incredible the very idea of works of visual art as bearing philosophical implications. I tip my hat to such a person, and wish them a happy life of looking at visual art freed from the burdens of philosophy. I would suggest by contrast that something along the lines suggested above does help us understand why we feel ourselves to be in a distinctive world, and not just in the good hands of a sensibility expressed in a distinctive style, when we consider the works of Giotto, Piero della Francesca, Michelangelo, Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Caravaggio, Poussin, Watteau, Cézanne, Picasso, and other European artists, as well as those of other traditions such as Muqi, Shitao, or Hokusai. For these artists offer to the suitably attuned viewer something of the quality of sustained reflection upon basic features of the visual world.

     By way of conclusion I would like to consider briefly two clusters of questions about the distinctive visual ontology embodied in Poussin’s dance drawings from the end of the 1620s through the mid-1630s. First, why did Poussin quit making drawings and paintings of dances in the mid-1630s, though he continued painting and drawing for another quarter of a century? Second, has anything of Poussin’s visual ontology in the dance drawings been taken up, transformed, and put to new uses by later artists? Or is it, however intriguing, simply a thing of its time?

     The first question is not explicitly addressed in any of the literature I’ve read, but on a longer view it’s not difficult to see why he would abandon the ring dance as a subject. As noted in my previous blog post, Poussin arranges the dancers so that they interweave in the foreground. This arrangement (or ‘disposition’ in Poussin’s own terminology) typically has two prominent effects that would tend to work against Poussin’s later stylistic aims. As often noted, the dancing figures are arranged in a frieze-like line. This induces in the viewer a kind of attention that unfolds so to speak in a linear manner, left-to-right or right-to-left. But from the late 1630s through the 1640s Poussin strove for greater centralization of his figures, and aimed to produce foci that would be first noticed by the viewer, whose attention would then spread from the foci to details, admiring along the way the learnedness exhibited therein. (Thomas Puttfarken gives an outstanding discussion of this transition from linearity to centrality in an analysis of Poussin’s two versions of ‘Extreme Unction’ (Puttfarken 2000)). And second, because the figures occupy large parts of the foreground, they tend accordingly to occlude large amounts of the background. But one of the challenges with which Poussin struggles in his later work is how to avoid the conception of the background as an indifferent staging for the foreground actions. Accordingly he attempts different ways of integrating foreground and background. In a few cases, he takes up a Quattrocento-like conception of evident and readily intelligible display of spatial recession. But in many cases, especially in his great body of work of so-called heroic landscapes, he devises novel solutions. In some cases, as Richard Wollheim noted, he treats the forces of wind and light as primarily active in the background, and then displaying their effects more subtly in the foreground. Or he treats foreground, middleground, and background as seemingly separated regions, but then introduces details to suggest that middle- and background details are analogues or resonances of foreground characteristics. So the dance and the manner in which Poussin depicted it had to be abandoned in the service of developing his later and richer conception of composition, integration, and detail.

     On the second question, that of the after-life of the visual ontology employed in Poussin’s dance drawings and paintings, it might seem that there are no such effects, in that it’s very much the later conception very partially described above is a major point of orientation for the succeeding 250 years of European painting. But just perhaps there is a way in which the earlier dance conception lives on. When I tried in the first blog post on Poussin to characterize the earlier visual ontology, I suggested that it involves a conception of space as self-generating. What might that mean? How would the conception become available to a viewer? One way might involve showing an as it were relatively inchoate or primordial area out of which relatively determinate spatial forms emerge. Now recall the overlooked point that Poussin’s ‘ring dances’ do not typically show a ring of dancing; rather they show an instant of dance, a ring-like crystallization, but upon closer inspection the dance itself is revealed as a line of dancers, even, in the case of Dance to the Music of Time, a broken line that seems to form and dissolve and re-form from two linked dancers. Another neglected point is that the dancers usually are not shown consistently linked left hand-to-right hand. Rather, Poussin is careful to include linkage of the same hand, left-to-left or right-to-right. Yet again one only notices this on careful inspection. So it is as if a person’s front and back can be reversed without visual consequence. And accordingly Poussin can arrange any particular figure either frontwards or backwards, regardless of the adjoining figures. And this might carry something of the sense suggested above of the earlier visual ontology, where a kind of inchoate figure is suggested that is neither frontwards or backwards, but neither and both of those.

     Where else do we such a daring visual conception? Consider one of the central works of a great lover of Poussin, namely Pablo Picasso’s The Dance (or Three Dancers) of 1925. The central dancer has her arms outstretched, with her face in particular showing Picasso’s characteristic scrambling of facial features so as to suggest that her face is seem simultaneously upright and marked bent and the neck. A single arrangement conveys two spatial positions. And there in one of the exhibit’s  later dance drawings, Bacchanal around a Herm, we find a dancing figure with outstretched arms and looking to her left at the Herm; yet Poussin has drawn, or really rather washed, the figure in such a way that one is uncertain, at least initially, whether the figure is facing forward or backward. On considered viewing I find that the backward viewing predominates, as it makes better sense to see the two roughly bisecting lines as indicated vertebrae and the cleft of the buttocks; yet the unwashed area on the left side of the torso, if focused upon, perhaps pushes it back towards a frontal view. Picasso cannot have failed to notice the play of orientations in this sort of wash drawing of Poussin.

References:

Bridget Alsdorf, ‘Pleasure’s Poise: Classicism and Baroque Allegory in Poussin’s ‘Dance to the Music of Time’, in Seventeenth Century 23 (2008)

Oskar Bätschmann, Nicolas Poussin: The Dialectic of Painting (1999)

R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (1940)

Thomas Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition (2000)

Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)

Poussin as an Ontologist, Part 2: The Claim Vindicated

     In my previous post, as a way of considering in what sense(s) a work of art might have ‘philosophical implications’, I took up Philip Rawson’s suggestion that in his drawings Nicolas Poussin was a kind of ontologist in offering there a distinctive ‘visual ontology’. Two ways of making sense of the claim were briefly discussed: 1. The anthropologist Philippe Descola claims that (i) there are four basic types of ontologies distinctive of human societies (animism; totemism; naturalism; analogism), where an ontology is characterized as a particular way of conceptualizing continuities and discontinuities between humans and non-humans with regard to their interiorities and bodies; and (ii) there are kinds and styles of art distinctive of each of the four ontologies. (Descola 2013 and 2018) 2. The philosopher Richard Wollheim claimed that two of the ways in which artists enrich the meaning of their works are (a) ‘the way of textuality’, whereby some piece of text and the propositions in it enter the content of an art work, but only under the limited conception of what the text means to the artist (and of course only insofar as the artist can make this conception accessible to a suitably attuned viewer); and (b) ‘the way of borrowing’, whereby an artist takes up and re-uses to new purposes some motif from the prior history of visual depiction. (Wollheim 1987) Although to my mind both of these claims are enormously important and valuable in suggesting concepts and frameworks for understanding the arts, for reasons I suggested in the prior post, in neither case do they seem to provide the conceptual resources for making sense of the claim that Poussin in his drawings was an ontologist.

    Here I’ll suggest another way of explicating the claim more satisfactorily, drawing from the writings of the philosopher R. G. Collingwood and art historian Oskar Bätschmann. Collingwood opens his book An Essay on Metaphysics with a consideration of the nature of metaphysics. First he discusses the idea that metaphysics is a branch of philosophy that investigates the most general conception of objects. Accordingly this branch is rightly called ‘ontology’, the doctrine of beings qua beings. Collingwood rejects this conception as empty; there’s little significant to be said about such a thin conception of beings. Rather, Collingwood endorses a second way of thinking about metaphysics, as the sustained investigation of the presuppositions of propositions. Collingwood conceives of propositions as in every case the answer to a question. Most simply, if I assert ‘that’s a cup’, the assertion is an answer to the question ‘what is that (thing/artifact)?’ He further asserts that there are two kinds of presuppositions: those that are rightly seen in turn  as themselves answers to questions, and those that are not answers to any question. The former he calls ‘relative presuppositions’, the latter ‘absolute presuppositions’. For Collingwood, metaphysics rightly understood is the investigation of absolute presuppositions, including propositions such as ‘all events have a cause’. Although there are difficulties in practice in making out the distinction between relative and absolute presuppositions (on this see Williams 19XX), and although Collingwood rejects the term ‘ontology’, his conception of metaphysics provides a clue as to how to explicate Rawson’s claim of Poussin as ontologist. How so?

     We might say that Poussin is an ontologist in offering a distinctive conception of basic features of objects, human beings, and nature, but also and crucially a distinctive conception of the art of drawing and its elements. On the second point, I can do no better than reproduce Bätschmann’s fundamental account at length:

“In his drawings Poussin apportions light and shade to figures on paper, and it is      in virtue of this process of division that we perceive them as representing objects. An object is defined by its emergence from division and its connection to light and shade. Every brush-stroke sets down in ink three elements: a dark area, paper as light, and darkness as the shadow of an object. The painted shadow and the paper turned into light counterbalance each other. They make objects appear but continue to manifest themselves as pure contrasts. The things they create—figures, their actions and their space, architecture and the natural world—all remain bound to the surface and to the dialectic of light and shade unfolding through them.” (Bätschmann, p. 3)

     I refer the reader to Bätschmann’s own explication of this in his book. Here I’ll consider the first point, the suggestion that Poussin offers a distinctive conception of human beings and nature, in relation to the exhibition’s drawings of dances. Much of the literature on Poussin refers without analysis to the subjects of the drawings, as well as his contemporaneous paintings, as ‘ring dances’. This certainly seems to make sense, at least initially; for example, in the famous painting ‘Dance to the Music of Time’ (included in the exhibition in London, but not in its showing at the Getty Center), at a glance the four figures seem to be holding hands while facing outward and dancing around a circle inscribed in the ground (the circle is more evident in one of Poussin’s related drawings). But a closer look reveals a much more complex, even puzzling, scene of this allegory. Both of the two figures on the left (the woman is Pleasure, and the man Poverty) are plainly moving towards the viewer’s left. Poussin occludes their hands that might be touching, but in any case if they were holding hands and drawing closer, they would quickly collide. The central woman Luxury has released the hand of the woman on the right Time; Luxury is being pulled leftward by Pleasure, and the alternate hand of Time has been grasped by Poverty. If one of the doublets (Pleasure/Luxury and Time/Poverty) continues along the circumference of the inscribed circle, then to respect the boundary of the area for dancing the other must pass nearer the center of the circle. The ‘ring dance’ is not a simple circling, but rather a more contrapuntal weaving.

     The earliest of the exhibited dance drawings is ‘Dance Before a Herm of Pan’ (c. 1628-30). Like some others of the drawings and paintings featuring a line of dancing figures, here one dancer on the end pours a libation to the herm, while the dancer on the other end heads between two other dancers and under their clasped hands. The drawing already displays the conception discussed by Bätschman, with the distinctive use of washes for the primary depiction of shadows, with relatively rare pen hatchings for their deepening. The areas untouched by washes indifferently include highlights (Poussin departs from the contemporaneous practice of marking highlights on bodies with an additional deposit of white), ground and background. This, as it were ontologically indifferent, conception of the unworked areas is the counterpart to the compositional practice of linking shadows across bodies (as noted by Rawson with regard to Poussin and a range of European artists including Rembrandt and Goya). The juxtaposition of unworked areas induces the thought of continuities across bodies and from foreground body to atmosphere: note, for example, the adjoining unworked areas in the juxtaposed forearms (and the suppression of the hands) of the libation-pourer and the man whose left hand she clapses; or the communion between the back of the dancer on the left and distant sky. The tendency, though, here and throughout the dance drawings and pictures is for the figures to form a pulsating frieze in the foreground that partially blocks the background, but even more occludes any visual cues that might sustain some sense of graduated recession across a middle-ground. The leading figure who dances under others’ arms sustains these conceptions: the line of dancers does not inhabit and measure a pre-given space, but rather turns in upon itself, a kind of self-churning and –involution.

      If something like this sketch of an analysis is right, we can then see how to flesh out the claim that Poussin is an ontologist in his art: the conception of the basic features of wash-and-ink drawing as explicated by Bätschmann fuses with Poussin’s characteristic choice of subject and composition to offer a unique ‘visual ontology’, though one that trades the generality of a philosophical account for realization in a small number of compelling artworks. If one were to attempt to put this ‘visual ontology’ in words, it would be something like ‘a vision of ontologically indifferent spatiality generating itself through movement’.

     In the final installment of this reflection on Poussin, I’ll consider one of the later dance drawings, ‘Bacchanal around a Herm’, in relation to a conjectured borrowing from it by Picasso.

References:

Oskar Bätschmann, Poussin: The Dialectics of Painting (1999)

R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (1940)

Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (2013)

-----‘The Making of Images’ (2018) in Thomas Fillitz and Paul van der Grijp (eds.), An Anthropology of Contemporary Art: Practices, Markets, and Collectors

Philip Rawson, Drawing (1987)

Bernard Williams, ‘An Essay on Collingwood’, in The Sense of the Past (2007)

Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)

Poussin as Ontologist?—Part 1: Attempts at an Explication

     There’s a persistent intuition, one that I share, that works of art carry philosophical implications. The attractiveness of the thought does nothing to alleviate its obscurity. Do all works of art carry such implications, or only a sub-set that are especially serious or profound or that address distinctively philosophical issues? The Getty’s current (April 2022) show of drawings and paintings by Poussin whose subjects are frieze-like lines of dancers offers an opportunity to explore this intuition in the developing work of this great artist whose work has long been considered as exhibiting a philosophical subject-matter, namely the philosophy of Stoicism.

     The works in the exhibition are from the late 1620s through the mid-1630’s, that is, from the period after Poussin’s arrival in Rome with a fluctuating style mostly modeled on Titian, to his marked shift in 1633 to Raphael as orienting, and the consequent development and intensification of his Classicism that in turn founded the main line of French academic painting, and which exerted such a pull on artists through Ingres and Cézanne until Picasso and even in recent decades with Leon Kossoff. As Whitlum-Cooper notes in the catalog, the subject of a line of dancers first occurs in a drawing from the late 1620’s, and is then the subject of a number of paintings and drawings through the mid 1630’s. (p. 32) The subject then disappears from Poussin’s work simultaneously with a stylistic shift that Anthony Blunt characterized as “a new and more dramatic style involving strong light effects.” (Blunt, p. 44)

     One line of thought that suggests itself is that, while works of art generally express something of the world-view of the artist and/or her society, some works of art address basic features of the world, such as the nature of physical objects, or human sentience, or human societies. In his magisterial book on drawing Philip Rawson claimed that Poussin’s work generally expressed a distinctive ‘visual ontology’, one that was a particularly distinguished version of the ontology embodied in the works of ‘Western draughtsmen’ who attempt “to establish a kind of eternal validity for static shapes marked off by lines, and for the closed static structure established by patterns of lines, related to each other across their directions.” Rawson goes on to assert that this manner of artistic rendering provides an image “of an extended present,” and cautiously suggests that it “may be associated with that type of Platonism which accords prime reality or substance to the abstract concepts represented by nouns and immutable class-relation systems.” (Rawson, p. 93)

     One virtue of Rawson’s suggestion is that he links the imputed visual ontology to distinctive manners of artistic rendering and composition, that is, to the emphasis on enclosed volumes, and to a kind of patterning across the volumes carried by perceived similarities of lines. I cannot see, though, how the evidence he cites supports the assertion that, however loosely construed, there is some distinctively Platonic, as opposed to, say, Aristotelian ontology. One might rather think the opposite: for though a Platonic form exists in something like an extended present, Platonic particulars of this world exhibit the vicissitudes of time and perspective; while the Aristotelian particular, a synthesis of some matter and an intelligibility-giving form, might well be thought to possess a determinate nature and boundedness evoked by a static shape enclosed by lines.

     One problem with Rawson’s attempt to derive a visual ontology from a particular style of rendering and composition, then, is the looseness of the connection between a given style and an ascribed ontology. On Rawson’s account the two are ‘associated’, but the mechanisms through which the association is forged are obscure. A recent suggestion by the anthropologist Philippe Descola aims to supply the looked-for mechanisms with an astonishingly ambitious, global account of basic cognitive frameworks. (Descola 2013) Descola argues that human societies embody one of four distinctive ontologies. Having surveyed a great range of human societies of different scales and on all inhabited continents, he claims that in every case a human society embodies a distinctive conception of two core areas of cognition, which he calls ‘interiority’ and ‘physicality’. And these two areas are in every case bound to a ‘mode of identification’ that centrally establishes conceived relations of continuity and/or discontinuity between self and other, and between one’s own embodiment and other bodies and things. Descola finds that, contrary to much anthropological thought, there is no grand division between nature and culture that is differently conceived in different cultures, but rather four great types of ontologies each characterized by one of the four logically possible. So one type of thought, animism, treats interiorities of both humans and other animals as the same, while animals have various kinds of bodies different from those of humans. Naturalism treats humans and animals as having similar bodies in their subjection to physical laws, while insisting on a radical divide between human and animal minds. In totemism humans treat some animals as sharing both their human interiorities and embodiments, while analogism treats both interiorities and bodies as differentiated. Descola has recently linked each of the four ontologies to different styles of art. So analogism, as in Classical Chinese art, seeks to find analogies between the differentiated individual beings along the human-animal-nature spectrum, while the totemic art of the Australian Aboriginals seeks to show each being as ontologically identical as an instance of and actor in the basic reality of Dreamtime. (Descola 2018)

     In contrast to Rawson’s account, Descola’s secures the link between style and ontology in conception, although of course the issue of whether and how a particular artistic style is linked to a particular ontology necessarily becomes a matter of interpretation if the society includes marked different or hybrid styles . But prima facie it’s hard to see how such an account could contribute to explaining how the work of one artist within a society, such as Poussin, could embody ‘philosophical implications’ in a way that, say, Raimondi’s doesn’t. Both artists’ works would on Descola’s account be instances of naturalist ontologies. How then might one explicate the suggestion that art works embodying philosophical implications are relatively rare, and perhaps also valued in part for their profundity? One attempt to explicate this point specifically with regard to Poussin was made in the 1980s by the philosopher Richard Wollheim in his book Painting as an Art. Wollheim discusses Poussin in the context of explicating what he views as a range of ways that artistic painters work so as enrich the meanings of their works. The primary routes of artistic meaning are through representation and expression, that is, through representing some subject, and in ways that cause their paintings to express mental states, moods, emotions, and feelings. Wollheim further claims that artists have other, secondary mechanisms of enrichment; prominent among these are ‘the way of textuality’, whereby what some piece of language means to the painter enters the content of the work, and ‘the way of borrowing’, whereby painters draw from some historical stock of imagery and put it to new and further uses in their works. Wollheim considers Poussin to have massively employed both of these ways, and in particular it is through the way of textuality that something of the philosophy of Stoicism becomes part of the content of many of his paintings. Now, the idea that Poussin was ‘influenced’ by Stoicism is standard, but Wollheim insists that Stoicism enters the content of the work, and only enters the content of the work, insofar as the painter has successfully devised a way of making manifest, not Stoicism per se, but some aspect of Stoicism under the painter’s very conception of it. How is this possible?

     Wollheim focuses on Poussin’s treatment of background landscapes across his oeuvre. Wollheim takes up and daringly expands two standard points in the interpretation of Poussin: that his landscapes are expressive of a sense of vitality and fecundity; and that a major feature of his artistic development involves his varying conceptions of the relation between the foregrounds of complex interactions of human figures, and the architectural and natural settings and backgrounds of those interactions. Under the model of Titian, Poussin’s first years in Rome treat the figures and backgrounds in the Venetian manner as emanations of a single mood. With Poussin’s shift towards Raphael as model, the figural foreground and the natural or architectural background become as it were ontologically distinct; nature and architecture are, as Wollheim puts it, ‘a contrastive presence’, like theatrical stages, and not themselves part of the depicted action. (Wollheim p. 201) Or so it seems. Wollheim focuses upon paintings whose manifest content seems to be the old Western topos of reason or morality versus desire in paintings of scenes from Tasso and Ovid: resisting the blandishments of Armida and Erminia and Aurora, Rinaldo and Tancred and Cephalus do their duty, or are faithful to their true love. But where do the male heroes gain their energy to resist? Through a series of daring interpretive moves, of a subtlety and complexity that prevents summary, Wollheim argues that in Poussin’s work nature represents first of all instinct, something obscure within a person that is a source of desire and its energies: “there is within human nature an autonomous force of instinct which in its beneficial operation retains its link with birth, with propagation, with self-renewal, a link which, in turn, involves an acceptance of death—an acceptance, I suppose both of the fact of death, and of our deathly or destructive side. And this conception permeates the whole of Poussin’s work, with time acquiring elaboration, subtlety, and the stain of pessimism.” (Wollheim, p. 207)

     If one accepts Wollheim’s account, it’s not difficult to see how Poussin’s work has ‘philosophical implications’, in that it embodies a distinctively and unarguably profound conception of human desire, reason, morality, and mortality. But there’s nothing, so it would seem, to encourage the thought that part of the philosophical implications of Poussin’s art involves the presentation of a distinctive visual ontology. Perhaps this is no cause for regret, and Rawson’s claim should be abandoned. And a fortiori there’s no reason to think that the dance theme of the exhibition is of more than an attractive gimmick. Wollheim does note that in Poussin’s first Roman phase he presents figures as “part of a frieze stretched out in front of nature”, (Wollheim p. 201) and this in the service of treating nature as something separate from humanity. But might there be some further philosophical implications carried by the works that present a dance? And might Poussin’s employment of this motif reveal something of a distinctive visual ontology? In part two I’ll address these questions with the aid of Oskar Bätschmann’s analysis of the basic conception embodied in Poussin’s drawing practice.

_______________________________________

References:

 Oskar Bätschmann, Poussin: The Dialectics of Painting (1999)

Anthony Blunt, The Drawings of Poussin (1979)

Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (2013)

-----‘The Making of Images’ (2018) in Thomas Fillitz and Paul van der Grijp (eds.), An Anthropology of Contemporary Art: Practices, Markets, and Collectors

Philip Rawson, Drawing (1987)

Francesca Whitlum-Cooper, ‘Animating the Frieze’ in Emily A. Beeny and Whitlum-Cooper (eds.), Poussin and the Dance (2021)

Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)

Neri Oxman at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

     It looks like an art exhibition. One approaches a large room and can see even at some distance various isolated artifacts: thin towers of glass; a mask in a niche; what look like 20 foot tall synthetic opened chrysalises; and various unclassifiable artifacts and models that suggest poured polymers invoking natural forms. There is nothing that at a glance would seem to challenge the contemporary sensibility’s readiness to classify such artifacts as art. But what sort of art, and under what conception?

     This is exhibition of works by the leading designer Neri Oxman, who over the past 15 years has introduced and developed a conception of her field of professional activity as ‘Material Ecology’, characterized by her in the following way:  Material Ecology is an “emerging field in design denoting informed relations between products, buildings, systems, and their environments. Defined as the study and design of products and processes integrating environmentally aware computational form-generation and digital fabrication, the field operates at the intersection of biology, material science and engineering, and computer science, with emphasis of environmentally informed digital design and fabrication.” (Antonelli, p. 13) So the term ‘design’ in Oxman’s sense is extraordinarily capacious, including not just the plans and associated mechanisms of fabrication of artifacts, but also relations among artifacts, and most broadly the relations between artifacts and the built and natural environments for which they are destined.

     Within this proposed general field, Oxman has staked out a particular practice, first at the Media Lab at MIT, and in the last three years through Oxman Architects in New York City. On a basic conception such as influentially given by the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, a practice involves a conception of some aim or aims that the regular exercise of the activities within the practice tends to realize. A practice further includes criteria of quality, that is, something that guides the sense of acting within the practice is relatively better or relatively worse ways, and an array of considerations of variable durability that additionally inform the practice. So, for example, in the practice of shoe-making the aim is to provide shoes to aid people in walking, with various sub-aims specified as kinds of walking, and additionally aesthetic and economic aims of stylishness and price. Oxman’s particular kind of practice includes these basic features, but also incorporates features distinctive of architectural practices, especially the inclusion of a particular client whose commission sets the relevant practical activities in motion, and whose needs, desires, interests, and tastes provide specifications of criteria and considerations guiding the activities. The client sets the practitioner a problem: design and make me such-and-such.

     Now Oxman innovates within this standard conception with three startling moves: 1. She conceives of her client not as this or that person or human group, but rather as nature itself. 2. She treats her practice as fundamentally not solving problems but rather seeking and discovering problems. 3. She derives her criteria of quality and other considerations from a particular conception of nature, which she characterizes as nature’s multi-functionality. What sort of practice could embody these conceptions? The answer that suggests itself is that while Oxman’s practice so conceived could have little actuality as a kind of architecture or design, but that it rather is recognizable as a kind of, if not artistic practice, then something sharing characteristics with such practices. This is perhaps clearest with regard to the second characteristic: as Michael Baxandall noted in a detailed comparison between the design and making of a bridge on the one hand, and the making of Cubist painting on the other, a standard design practice treats the problem(s) to be solved as given from outside the practice—the bridge must span such and such points; carry at least a certain load; resist such and such stresses; and much else; whereas the making of an artistic painting typically involves responding to a range of problems that emerge in the very process of making. (This difference is of course not absolute; many artists, even some in the twentieth-century such as Igor Stravinsky or George Balanchine, seem to prefer to create within a field structured by numerous constraints of commissions, genres, and structures stipulated from outside the creative process.) The first characteristic, that the client is nature, gains content in part through what it rejects: there is no precise commission from a human agent, and, given the enormous range of senses that attach to the term ‘nature’ (as Arthur Lovejoy famously observed with regard to its invocation in aesthetics), nature as a client stipulates no determinate directives. What nature as a client does direct, according to Oxman’s third characteristic, is that her works exhibit the multi-functionality of especially certain organic skins and surfaces. Oxman is struck by the ways in which a skin is not simply an enclosure marking the outer edge of an organism and protecting the innards, but also something that helps regulate the organism’s internal temperature, serves as an attractant or repellent of other organisms, and in some cases displays something of the organism’s internal structure. This third characteristic is particularly prominent in the complex color patterns she gives her works, many of which directly register the changes in appearance of various organisms responding to their environments.

     For the most part Oxman speaks of her works as instances of design, but in an interview summarized in Arthur I. Miller’s book on science and contemporary art, she is quoted in ways that reinforce the sense that her practice is at least crypto-artistic. Miller quotes her as asserting that ‘design is art’, and that the distinctive role of art is to question ‘a certain reality’. Further, the best way to think of design is as a ‘translation between disciplines’, a formulation that irresistibly evokes the inter-medial character of so much contemporary art, as well as its frequent heteronomy, that is, the willingness of contemporary artists to accept and respond to imperatives from outside the art world. (Miller, p. 104)

    One way to see the distinctiveness of Oxman’s artistic practice is to compare her works with those of central figures in contemporary art. ‘Cartesian Wax’ (2007) is a wall-mounted rectangular tile of rubber, resin, and wax. The surface is densely rippled in a quasi-grid of bubbles that for the most part are considerably lighter than the field from which they emerge. The yellowish-brownish field darkens gradually from upper left to lower right, a shift very partially echoed in the reduced size of the protuberances. A structural counter-rhythm arises from some horizontal and vertical rows of relatively unvarying bubbles. This is part of a series that Oxman has described as consisting of types exhibiting “a continuous surface fabricated in response to physical conditions such as light transmission, heat flux, stored energy modulation, and structural support.” (Antonelli, p. 59) The piece’s appearance invites comparison with the latex works of Eva Hesse, whose works likewise exhibit gradations of lightness, thickness, and protuberance. But content and metaphoricity of the two bodies of work could hardly be otherwise more different. Whereas for Oxman the aim of this series of works is to “experiment with light- and heat-sensitive construction techniques specific to any given environment, resulting in structures designed and built to fit organically with their surroundings” (ibid), Hesse’s works aim to present environmental forces in graduated oppositions—light and dark; opaque and transparent; gravity and weightlessness—together with the sense of how these both structure and impinge upon human embodiment. Oxman offers to send her work into the world, where Hesse returns the abstracting gestures of late modernist art to their source in human embodiment. Perhaps something of this consideration of contrasts aids in understanding the sense that there is something cold, something not yet realized in Oxman’s works. They have not yet arrived at their proper destination in an inhabitable future. 

 References:

Paola Antonelli with Anna Burckhardt, The Neri Oxman Material Ecology Catalogue (2020)

Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention (1985)

Arthur Lovejoy, ‘Nature as Aesthetic Norm’, Modern Language Notes, Vol. 42, No. 7 (Nov., 1927)

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981)

Arthur I. Miller, Colliding Worlds: how cutting-edge science is redefining contemporary art (2014)

On Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021)

     Despite its title, Andreas Malm’s recent book How to Blow Up a Pipeline contains no concrete instructions on how to accomplish that particular deed. Malm does assure the reader that disabling pipelines is not particularly difficult, and describes a number of cases—in Iraq, South Africa, Israel/Palestine, and Nigeria--where it was done as part of political campaigns of resistance to governments and corporations. The ‘How to’ of the title is rather a matter of how to think about strategies of political resistance to the forces of ‘business-as-usual’, to the extent that such forces contribute to and indeed accelerate global warming and ecological degradation. The phrase ‘Blowing up a Pipeline’ is a synecdoche for acts of violence done with the aim of resistance. A more literal though no less startling title for the book would be Manifesto for Political Violence in the Service of Humanity.

     The book consists of three chapters. The first, ‘Learning from Past Struggles’, fist sets out the need and target for action on climate change. The most distinctive problem for formulating action is the urgency of the situation, one that stems from the physical laws governing a planet with increasing atmosphere levels of carbon dioxide. The cause of this increase is the ever-intensifying ‘fossil economy’, “an economy of self-sustaining growth predicated on the growing consumption of fossil fuels.” (11) Malm then startlingly charges that the most recent movements of climate activists, above all Extinction Rebellion, have fetishized non-violence, allegedly resulting in their actions having fallen abysmally far from their goals. Malm further argues that the organizational charter of Extinction Rebellion falsifies the history of violent resistance. Malm ridicules the idea of ‘absolute’ pacifism, which he understands as the principled renunciation of any use of force whatsoever. More realistically, pacifism in practice is a ‘strategic’ pacifism, one which does not renounce the use of force in any and all cases, but one which argues that the use of force in some particular context is ineffectual or counter-productive. He shows that ‘non-violent’ activists like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. were strategic pacifists; and that once one recognizes that the judgment of whether to use political violence is situational, a conceptual route is opened to consider the efficacy of kinds and degrees of force in political strategizing. Malm concludes with the suggestion that in any case the value of comparing past political strategies with those of present climate activism is limited by the unique characteristic of the climate crisis: our crisis is uniquely urgent on account of the various ‘tipping points’ in global heating and ecological degradation, and likewise unique in its global scope.

     The second chapter, Breaking the Spell, is the core of the book, as it presents positive case for political violence. The only kind of destructiveness Malm describes in detail is not disabling pipelines, but rather an efficient and convivial way of deflating the tires of SUVs, a “direct action as prank, perhaps too jolly and tender to deserve the term ‘sabotage’.” (84) Here’s how a group of young activists did it in Stockholm in July 2007: They walked by night the streets of an affluent neighborhood. Whenever they encountered a rich person’s SUV, above all Hummers, they would unscrew the cap on the valve of a tire, insert a piece of gravel, and screw the cap back down: job done in about an hour. A leaflet left on the windshield explains that this is no ordinary prank, but an admonishment: “what you seem to not know, or not care about, is that all the gasoline you burn to drive your SUV on the city’s streets has devastating consequences for others.” These consequences would be soonest and worst for “poor people far away” who would be most affected by global warming. In defending the deflation of SUVs tires as a model of resistance, Malm reasons as follows: 1. We must renounce violence that aims at or constitutively involves harming sentient beings, but violence targeting commodities, artifacts, and infrastructures need not involve such harm and so involve no cruelty. 2. We must accept that property destruction does, at least in the global North, typically count as violence. 3. Following the philosopher Henry Shue, we distinguish luxury and subsistence emissions. Luxury emissions are paradigmatically that occur in rich people’s rapid and/or non-essential travel, such as in SUVS, super-yachts, or private jets. “Subsistence emissions occur in the pursuit of physical reproduction, in the absence of feasible alternatives. Luxury emissions can claim neither excuse.” (88) 4. “It follows that states should attack luxury emissions with axes—not because they necessarily make up the bulk of the total, but because of the position they hold.” (92) The position they hold is that such emissions “represent the ideological spear of business-as-usual, not only maintaining but actively championing the most unsustainable kinds of consumption.” (92) 5. Because of the unlikelihood of the ruling classes self-limiting their emissions, and because luxury emissions are “the low-hanging fruits of mitigation” of carbon emissions, it is “[t]ime to pick up some sticks and knock the fruit down.” (93) Malm concludes that “if we have to cut emissions now [which Malm considers a political and moral necessity], that means we have to start with the rich.” (94)

    The rest of the second chapter and the whole of the third chapter, ‘Fighting Despair’, consider the likely effects, more psychological than physical, of committing violent acts aiming at reducing carbon dioxide emissions and ultimately transitioning humanity away from its ever-intensifying use of fossil fuels. To a range of objections that center on the claim that political violence is ineffective and self-defeating, Malm counters with the thought, the political thought, that violent climate activists will constitute a ‘radical flank’ within the broader movement and induce a shifting of political positions that might actually lead to the positive changes that the non-violent actions of Extinction Rebellion have not brought about. Psychologically, such action might destroy the sense of inevitability and invincibility of rich and the ruling classes; Malm quotes the Iranian activist Amir Parviz Pouyan on its hoped-for effect: “The spell breaks and the enemy looks like a defeated magician.” (95)

     Continuing in this vein, the third chapter strikes me as strained in its suggestion that such action might end the jaded despair that we can do nothing to mitigate or stop, and ends by invoking the famous alarming quote from Franz Fanon that violence is a ‘cleansing force.’ Still, if not such targeted violence towards artifacts, then what are we to do?

References:

Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital (2015)

-----How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021)

Henry Shue, Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection (2014)

On Alva Noë's Learning to Look (2021)

     What do we want from a theory of art? Perhaps the most common imperative embodied in theories of art has been for some criterion or set of criteria for distinguishing works of art from both natural objects and also human artifacts and performances. Neither hunks of marble nor plates nor pronouncements of marriage are artworks; what distinguishes them Michelangelo’s Pietá or a Picasso ceramic or a performance of the Oresteia? Or are those invidious examples, or the wrong questions to ask, and if so why? A second concern typically addressed in theories of art is question of what function or functions are fulfills in human life. Is there some single aim across the arts, such as human self-exploration in and through a sensuous medium? Or are there several, typically overlapping aims? And can appeal to considerations of human evolution guide inquiry into these? A third, much less commonly addressed concern might be to explicate what if any distinctive kinds of meaningfulness—kinds of rhetoric, style, metaphor, symbolism, etc.—arise in the arts. Is artistic meaning something sui generis, or is it a kind of intensification or elaboration of the sorts of meaningfulness possessed by everyday artifacts? Or is there no distinction between meaning in art and in everyday life?

     General theories of art have been unfashionable in Anglo-American philosophy for over a half of a century. One wave of rejections that began cresting around 1960 centered on the Wittgenstein-inspired thought that art, like games, did not admit of a definition: there were no set of necessary and sufficient conditions for something being a work of art; rather there were at most resemblances among various undisputed instances of art, and so the task of mapping these resemblances (and non-resemblances) replaced the definitional task. Another wave of rejections turned on the formerly fashionable idea that there were no interesting human universals, including of course art, a wave that crashed on, among other things, Donald E. Brown’s demonstration in 1991 of dozens of such universals. Most recently has been the wave of exhaustion, signaled by Peter Kivy in the late 1990’s, where philosophers have simply turned away from the definitional project in favor of investigations into particular art forms or kinds, such as painting or opera or movies. An outstanding and philosophically rigorous instance of this has recently come from Dominic Lopes, who has argued that making and appreciating a work of art gain nothing through appeal to the work’s status as art per se, but rather these activities and their artifactual and/or performative products occur and are guided by the role they play in practices of particular art kinds.

    Standing against these three great Anglo-American waves of rejection have been a small number of philosophers. The most prominent of these was Arthur Danto, who in 1981 proposed that art works are distinguished from natural objects and non-artistic artifacts in that (a) they have meanings (and so are different from natural objects); and (b) they embody their meanings (and so are different from other artifacts. Danto never quite gives the explicit account of what it means to embody a meaning, as opposed merely having a meaning, but his main line of thought seems to be that works of art possess distinctive kinds of expression, style, rhetorical appeal, and metaphoricity uncharacteristic of most artifacts. Starting a few years later, Danto went on to write a very large body of art criticism that bears an uncertain relation to this general theory. Some of the same examples are used in both bodies of work, such as Roy Lichtenstein’s painting of a brush stroke and, to the point of obsession, Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes. Much of Danto’s criticism consisted of free-wheeling philosophical speculation and recovery and analysis of the particular artist’s vision, her manner of seeing and interpreting the world, which was Danto’s core characterization of style. So while his art criticism is plausibly seen as roughly consistent with his theory of art, the criticism could have been just as well written by someone who lacked any theory of art, but was interested in issues of style in contemporary art. But if a theory of art offers no guidance in understanding, appreciating, and criticizing works of art, is this not grist for Lopes’s mill?

    Among the very few general theories of art published this century, Alva Noë’s account in 2015 in his book Strange Tools stands out for its novelty and revelatory qualities. And the recent publication his book Learning to Look, which includes many short pieces of criticism that he wrote during and after his work on Strange Tools, offers the richest recent attempt to apply a theory of art to the criticism of actual works. Does it work?

      Noë’s fascinating account is easy enough to state, but not perhaps easy to understand. I’ll try to capture its distinctive features in a few propositions: 1. Human behavior, including above all actions, habits, and practices, is best characterized as ways of bringing and maintaining order and organization. Examples of such behavior include breast-feeding, conversation, playing baseball, and dancing. 2. There is a separate and much smaller class of human activities rightly called ‘art’. Art is a second-order activity, in that it always involves the re-organization of prior (first-order) behaviors (as identified in proposition #1). The most basic feature of art as a second-order activity is that it shows or displays a first-order activity. Further, in showing or displaying the conceptually prior activity art proposes new perspectives upon and poses questions about that activity, and thereby opens up routes of investigation and contemplation of that activity. Art shares these features with philosophy. 3. Human tools are made for and are used within human activities. A hammer, for example, is made to drive a nail, and this basic activity is embedded within a larger activity, such as being a house. Tools accordingly have functions, and these functions are themselves intelligible in virtue of the roles they play in teleological-ordered practices, institutions, and social spheres. But art is tool-like without being a tool, in that it lacks a (first-order) function. Art is accordingly a ‘strange tool’.

    Noë’s book attracted mixed reviews in both academic journals and mainstream venues. For example, the philosopher Mohan Matthen, much of whose recent work explores evolutionary accounts of aesthetics and art, dismissed outright Noë’s claim about the identical function of art and philosophy while affirming the basic thought that art always involves the re-organization of prior organized activities. The distinguished philosopher of art Nöel Carroll, whose wide-ranging work of several decades includes detailed consideration of experimental arts, particularly dance, argued that Noë’s analysis of art as a strange tool was valid at most for avant-garde arts. Might then Noë’s new collection offer in particular some illumination on the application of theories of art to the markedly non-traditional works of Contemporary art?

      The subtitle of Learning to Look is Dispatches from the Art World. Noë refers to “the art world and its glamorous enticements” (17), and so seems to use the term ‘art world’ in the informal sense referring to anything associated with the social 31the people associated those worlds, including artists, critics, gallerists, curators, collectors, and celebrity scene-makers. The subtitle is a bit misleading, in that a number of pieces including have little or nothing to do with the art world, such as a reviews of books on physics and linguistic variation. Another difficulty in evaluating Noë’s claims stems from the format of short columns addressed to a non-specialist audience. This rhetorical situation seems to intensify Noë’s penchant, lamented by Matthen (and myself), in Strange Tools for framing coy conundrums and tone-deaf aphorisms; the following description of the Hollywood pot-boiler Top Gun nearly induced an episode of book-throwing in this reviewer: “George Balanchine has nothing on [director] Tony Scott’s exhibition of counterpoint and organization as men and fighter planes maneuver on the deck of an aircraft carrier, eventually upswelling into a gravity-defying, soaring supersonic pas de deux of jets in flight, all to the thrilling pulse of Kenny Loggins’ soundtrack-defining song “Danger Zone.”” (31) Balanchine reformed an art form, ballet, into something that could be a vehicle of great artistic aspiration in the twentieth-century; worked with Stravinsky to produce among the greatest dance works of the twentieth-century (Apollo, Four Temperaments, Agon, etc.); introduced and developed in choreography a distinctive conception of dance as visualized music; extended inherited ballet technique in the service of a novel kind of abstracted corporeal expressiveness; etc.). There is no serious comparison in aspiration and achievement between Balanchine and Scott. It’s not only snobbishness that requires one to pass by many of Noë’s remarks.

     Nonetheless, there are, I think, two areas in which Noë’s accounts merit attention and reflection: the conception of artistic meaningfulness that arises from his application of his theory of art; and his conception of historicity within Contemporary art. On the first point, his fullest account comes in a review of the Albanian artist Anri Sala’s 2-room video installation Ravel Ravel Unravel (13-15). In one room a monitor shows two different pianists’ left hands in near-synchronized performances of Ravel’s concerto for the left hand. The other room shows the French DJ Chloé at a deck manipulating the LPs of the two performances, “scratching, pushing, stopping, accelerating, and decelerating the records.” (15) Noë makes four interpretive points: 1. There’s a kind of excitement present in the work’s presentation of a “techno-perceptual puzzle” (14). 2. The work presents different kinds and aspects of agency and ways in which these are altered through technology. 3. The hands are parts of male bodies, whereas the female DJ is presented double-handed and intact.  And 4: “like all art everywhere, the raw materials out of which she [Chloé] makes her art is the making activity of other people.” (15) These points individually and collectively surely illuminate the work and support Noë’s perhaps disappointingly anodyne conclusion that “Anri Sala’s strange and beautiful performance illuminates art and technology and their place in our active lives.” The fourth point is self-admittedly a truism, though one at the core of Noë’s theory of art. The first point too shares in the general theory’s insistence that works of art as second-order tools are inherently ‘strange’, i.e. puzzling and disturbing and seemingly non-functional. Points 2 and 3 do not evidently derive from the general theory, with the second point being a bit of introductory throat-clearing, and the third a penetrating observation of the sort one hopes for in reading art criticism. Perhaps it’s something of this mixture of truism, theory-guided observation, and independent critical insight that one can hope when a philosopher of art turns their attention to art criticism.

    The second point, Noë’s conception of historicity, or at least the historical dimension of recent art, leads deeper into problematic aspects of both Noë’s project and of the art he discusses. This concern is closest to the surface in his review of the an exhibition of works by Henri Matisse and Richard Diebenkorn at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2017 (38-40). As Noë notes, Diebenkorn’s encounters (especially in the 1940s and 1950s) with various works by Matisse provided key models upon which Diebenkorn formed his distinctive conception of ambitious Modern art, and stimulated Diebenkorn in major shifts in his own painting style and subjects. Yet Noë goes on to note: “there’s something arbitrary and gimmicky about the pairing. The story of Matisse’s influence on Diebenkorn is never more than a good story, a hook to keep a viewing public interested until they can find a way to actually notice or be gripped by the work itself.” (40) Perhaps part of the target of Noë’s criticism here is that attitude that only finds artistic interest in what leads up to a work and/or what developments a work induces. I’ve often heard in response to a critical remark about some artist that “well, of course they influenced a lot of people.” Then part of Noë’s claim is that in artistic response there must be after all some part of the response that finds interest and value in the work itself, not only in its ancestry or descendants. Still, it’s startling that Noë judges the work itself, the content or subject or artistic focus of this or that painting by Diebenkorn, to be available outside of any historical conditions. It seems to me this contravenes the very point that Noë initially affirms, that Diebenkorn’s relation to the model of Matisse is partially constitutive of who he was as an artist, and this historical dimension enters into the content of Diebenkorn’s work. If so, Noë’s judgment mutilates Diebenkorn’s art in stripping it of its historical dimension, thereby denying the seriousness of Diebenkorn’s historical thinking not just in his life, but in his art. Perhaps in this peculiar criticism Noë’s criticism pays the price of his not having a theory of art that fully incorporates the thought that all art is an historical phenomenon. And perhaps further the lack of this dimension is not some individual failing of Noë’s, but rather corresponds to the peculiar nature of Contemporary art, an art that builds its traditions out of determinedly anti-traditional attitudes.

References:

Donald E. Brown, Human Universals (1991)

Noël Carroll, ‘Comments on Alva Noë’s Strange Tools’ in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, January 2017

Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981)

-----After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (1995)

Peter Kivy, Philosophies of Arts: An Essay in Differences (1997)

Dominic McIver Lopes, After Art (2014)

Mohan Matthen, review of Strange Tools, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews,    February 15, 2016

Alva Noë, Strange Tools (2015)

-----Learning to Look (2021)

45 Seconds for Joints: On Carol Trindade’s Performance at the Mall of America

In December of 2021 the Brazilian dance-theater artist Carol Trindade improvised for some 20 hours a kind of theatrical dance in the window of a store in the Mall of America in Minnesota. She has posted forty-five seconds of this improvisation on YouTube. Dressed in a black-and-white checked one-piece skirt, she stands behind a glass window in a small space irregularly decorated with same checked pattern she wears. She has identified herself as an artist working at the intersection of the dance of Butoh and clowning, with the Tanztheater work of Pina Bausch another point of orientation. This segment begins with her crouching, hands forward and elbows bent, and looking to her right; it ends with her fully upright, arms slightly extended at her sides. Several of her movements between plainly evoke the movements of a toy or a doll, with bent and inflexible elbows or knees (rarely both at the same time), mechanical shakes of the head, and contrasting flashes of extraordinary flexibility of the hips and lower torso that suggest something made of rubber or clay. The motif of a doll or toy coming to life is familiar from classical and modern ballets such as Coppélia, The Nutcracker, and Petrouchka. Why does it re-emerge in this most contemporary of contexts and dancers, and in one whose work otherwise bears no trace of ballet?

     One of the canonical texts of dance is the short and profoundly enigmatic piece by the playwright Heinrich von Kleist from 1810 entitled ‘Puppet Theatre’ (or sometimes rendered ‘On the Marionette Theater’). The piece purports to describe a conversation between the unnamed narrator and a famous dancer named Herr C. that was incited by their mutual watching of a marionette-theater set up in a market place. The often-cited conclusion states that the marionettes, like a god, seem to possess a kind of grace that human beings, with their self-inhibiting consciousness and reflectiveness, have lost, and that humans can only re-gain when they eat again of the Tree of Knowledge and possess self-consciousness to an infinite degree. But the earlier parts of the discussion, though equally enigmatic, perhaps provide more hints as to the enduring attraction of the motif of the animation of dolls. One advantage of puppets over humans, so Herr C. claims, “is that they are not subject to the law of gravity,” and so “only use the ground as fairies do; brushing it lightly in order that the momentary check may give a new impulse to their bounding limbs.” In ballet, as the aesthete and art critic Adrian Stokes put it in 1935, the rigidity of the floor is recruited into the dance in two ways, two gender-specific ways. Both are manners of assault and revelation: the male ballet dancer’s legs assault the stage like cylinders “as if pumping up from beneath,” while the female dancer’s assault is a show of indifference, “the suspended oval of the ballerina’s form gracing the stage in an attitude.” (Stokes, p. 51) The animation of the ballet dancer shares with the animation of a toy something of the overcoming of gravity and material as weight. So too the forty-five second rise of Trindade, except that her work is not assaultive, but rather eirenic through her absorption in and continuity with her checkerboard environment, a continuity further enhanced through her wearing socks rather than shoes or being barefoot.

     Stokes’s further thought that the ballet dancers’ assault on the stage is only a part of a broader theatrical conception in ballet wherein the three-sided box of staged space is a metaphor for the body, one also assaulted from its sides in the service of a eliciting its inner life (p. 54) suggests what I would take to be the most central meaning of Trindade’s invocation of the animated doll. To see this one must recall an earlier performance of hers in Miami where she posed within a glass box as a robot that could be made to dance by the viewer’s manipulation of a handle. The mere idea of the viewer in control is invoked, but no one is taken in: the viewer immediately understands that it is Trindade who arranges the situation, who only ‘pretends’ to dance, and the fantasy of control is sustained in the service of its self-undermining. The disjunction between the fantasy of control and Trindade’s movements is bridged by the play of the viewer’s imagination among the elements of moving the handle, observing Trindade’s movements, and attempting to recover Trindade’s intentions. Kleist’s Herr C notes that the life-like movements of a puppet arise not from the puppeteer’s precise control of every articulation of the figure, but rather from simple lines of movement that control the joints, and that the puppeteer does not thereby so much control the joints as “place himself at the marionette’s own center of gravity, in other words that he [i.e. the puppeteer] should dance.” (p. 180) So whereas the traditional puppeteer, whether hidden from or visible to the audience, is a matter of secondary aesthetic interest while typically taking on the conception (as explicitly in Petrouchka) of a conjurer, Trindade’s use of the motif of the animated doll is distinctively contemporary, invoking the artistic conventions of installation art wherein the viewer’s own physical, perceptual, imaginative, and cognitive activities are invoked and put on display for reflection.

     All this in forty-five seconds from some play with the joints in a movement from squatting to standing. And what might have arisen in the twenty hours of improvisation?

--John Rapko

References:

Friedrich von Kleist, ‘Puppet Theatre’ (1810) in What is Dance? (1983), edited by Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen

Adrian Stokes, To-Night the Ballet (1935)

Carol Trindade, Mall of America Performance (2021), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvSRTG4vEKU&ab_channel=CarolTrindade (accessed 1/05/22)

On Tim Ingold's Correspondences (2021)

     In recent years the topics investigated in the academic philosophy of art in English have greatly expanded beyond the more traditional foci of issues arising from reflection upon masterworks in literature, music, and the visual arts, the individuation of art forms and media, and the concept of art generally. This century has already seen the publication of monographs and edited collections on topics such as street art and graffiti, pornography as art, games as art; computers as an artistic medium or form; and the ‘wild’ arts of tattooing and body modification. Along with this expansion of topics has been a great deal of thinking that reflects and draws upon recent work in cognitive science. One striking omission, so it seems to me, in these expansions has been research in the anthropology of art. In my reading of contemporary philosophy of art there is only the rarest of mentions of classic works in the anthropology of art, such as those of Frans Boas, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gregory Bateson, and Clifford Geertz. I can’t recall a single mention in the philosophy of art of the most discussed such work of recent decades, Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency, nor a fortiori of the more recent work, influential in anthropology, of Philippe Descola and Carlo Severi. What might the consideration of the anthropology of art contribute to the philosophy of art?

     The philosopher of art Richard Wollheim offered a rare consideration of this question in the late 1970s. Wollheim counter-posed the question with a second question: What might the philosophy of art contribute to the anthropology of art? An initial response to these two questions goes: suppose there are a number of concepts (Wollheim calls them ‘aesthetic concepts’) instantiated in familiar examples of European arts. Wollheim’s chief example of such a concept is style, but one might include concepts of genres, such as comedy, or aesthetic qualities, such as gracefulness. Unaided by the anthropology of art, a philosopher of art might ask two sorts of questions: 1. What are the conditions under which a work of art instantiates such-and-such aesthetic concept? 2. In what ways, and to what degree, do various aesthetic concepts form part of whatever regulates the making of an artwork? (If a concept regulates an artist’s making of an artwork, Wollheim says that it has ‘psychological reality’.) Suppose further that secure answers are given to questions 1 and 2. Then one contribution of the anthropology of art would be to provide a range of presumptive artworks that do not obviously possess such-and-such aesthetic concept: what aesthetic qualities are possessed by an Asmat shield, or by a nail-embedded nkosi statue? Do Haida carvings exhibit individual style? Is a Wari weaving with its schematic flying shamans comic? The anthropologist can test the philosopher’s analyses and hand the results back to her. But this limited interaction—the philosopher analyzes, the anthropologist tests—is evidently a highly constricted and imaginatively impoverished way of considering the possible mutual contributions of the two paths of reflection on the arts; for as proposed it seems to lack a point other than to bulk up the classifications of the world’s art, and it passes over the possibility that the anthropology of art might offer something that challenges the foundations and assumptions of the philosophy of art. Wollheim goes on to offer a tentative sketch of the aesthetic concept of style, and suggests that part of what might be learned are what he somewhat mysteriously calls the ‘primes’ style, by which I take him to mean elements revealed as common to works by, say, Titian, Dong Qichang, and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, and revealed at the appropriate level of abstraction and in a way relatively undistorted by local prejudices.

     Since Gell’s death and the publication of Art and Agency in the late 1990’s, the anthropologist writing in English who has contributed the most impressive reflections on basic concepts in the arts is surely Tim Ingold, the author of numerous books and essays over the past 45 years, including two books published in 2021. Ingold has published a detailed overview of the course of his work (Ingold 2011, pp. 3-14), which arises from the ethnographic work among the Lapps in the 1970’s, and is guided by attempts to undermine the rigid distinction between nature and culture, and to question the distinction between the human and the non-human, especially animals. Here I will set aside much of the trajectory of Ingold’s thinking on artifacts and art, and focus on his recent book Correspondences (2021), which offers a number of previously published short pieces in response to particular works of art, as well as essays aiming to illuminate basic issues raised by particular exhibitions. Before considering this recent work, I’ll sketch Ingold’s core interests on this particular topic: Ingold’s thinking on the arts revolves around two claims with attached programs:

     1. Negatively: Much of Western thought, from Aristotle to the present, approaches the nature of the arts, as well as the natures of technologies, tools, and artifacts, through the framework of the ‘hylomorphic’ model of explanation. On this Aristotelean model any entity (a tode ti, a ‘this’), and artifacts and artworks in particular, are understood as unions of two ontologically distinct elements: form (morphe) and matter (hyle). There are many versions of this model, embodying claims of varying strengths, but crucially for Ingold the model embodies a conceptually prior ontological divide, indeed chasm, between form and matter. Further, on this conception form and matter are relatively active and passive respectively, and the presence of form induces the actualization of otherwise latent potentials within matter. Ingold rejects every aspect of this model: the presupposed ontological gulf; the restriction of activity to form; the assumption that order is something ‘outside’ of matter and that is imposed upon matter; and the aim of offering a model of intelligibility of an entity as given in a ‘distanced’ explanation. A great deal of his negative argumentation focuses on the rejection of a particular version of the hylomorphic model wherein the intention of a maker of artifacts plays the role of form, and the materials used in the making play the role of matter. So conceived, the resultant artifact is understood as the realized intention of the maker and thereby fulfills a function as intended by the maker.

     2. Positively: Ingold aims to replace the vocabulary and concepts associated with the hylomorphic model (form; matter; intention; function) with a different and novel vocabulary derived from his own analyses of such things as lassoing, basket-making, brick-making, and story telling, and bolstered with analyses and proposals from a range of 20th century philosophers, especially Dewey, Heidegger, Gilbert Simondon, and Deleuze and Guattari. On Ingold’s account the conception of entities as spatio-temporally delimited hylomorphic unions are replaced by the conception of things as fundamentally temporal and always in process. Firstly, things are fundamentally trajectories without beginning or end. The appropriate image of a thing is a line. Secondly, lines intersect: things exist and persist in the midst of other things; the setting and appropriately complex image of this is not a spatio-temporal grid with entities occupying particular coordinates, but rather a kind of ever-changing ‘meshwork’ with transient nodes where different trajectories intersect. Thirdly, the intersection of trajectories is not well understood as involving a relatively passive surface of one entity acted upon by another entity, but rather an open region wherein each trajectory affects the other, and the trajectories mutually respond to each other; trajectories are neither active nor passive, but are something rightly described in ‘the middle voice’. Surfaces are places of exchange and response among various trajectories. Fourthly, Ingold introduces a kind of master term, ‘correspondence’, both (a) to characterize the processual activities within a region (things ‘correspond’ to each other); and (b) to name the attitude characteristic of a person who grasps something like Ingold’s proposed ontology and approaches the world in its terms. So an artist is said to ‘correspond’ with her materials in making an artwork. Another term for correspondence in action is ‘following’, which again invokes the distinction between Ingold’s favored attitude and the attitude characteristic of someone in the grips of the hylomorphic scheme, one that encourages the idea that making is an imposition of form on passive matter. Ingold suggests that one appropriate way to describe an artist’s making is that in making a work the artist is following her materials.

     How can one use this startlingly novel conception with regard to the arts? Unsurprisingly, Ingold rejects much of what typically counts as explanation of the arts, whether in anthropology, art history, or criticism. Such explanation conceives an artwork as a spatio-temporally delimited entity, and then places this entity within some delimited context; a painting is ‘explained’ by placing it within the contexts of an artist’s oeuvre and the broader (but delimited) historical or social or political context. But on Ingold’s account the presupposed unities of artwork, oeuvre, and context are the fictive products of a distanced and impoverished use of the imagination. The point, the anthropological point, is not to explain but to correspond, to follow. So the various pieces in his book Correspondences are fundamentally performative followings of artworks; in Ingold’s words, each piece is “a provisional exercise in observational thinking” that is “held together by lines of correspondence.” (p. 220) They are not ‘about’ works, that is, they are not offered as explications of the meanings of artworks, but rather they are ‘wanderings’, instances of  ‘joining with’ works and ‘moving along’ with them (p. 7, with the terminology introduced more generally than just with regard to artworks).

     As performative followings, the individual pieces defy summary, something in the way that a Platonic dialogue does; understanding these works is likewise a never-completed product of entering into their process of observation and reflection. To a degree, and despite Ingold’s explicit statement, much of this fits well into aspects of art criticism as it is regularly practiced. Consider Ingold’s piece ‘In the shadow of tree being’, a piece written for a catalog of the works of the Italian conceptual sculptor Giuseppe Penone. Ingold writes that he makes no reference all to Penone or his art (p. 33), but that he attempts something similar to the way Penone “corresponds with trees, bodies, the wind and much more.” (p. 42) The piece itself consists explicitly of a loosely linked set of reflections on body, shadow, touch, time, and art, and is illustrated with two of Penone’s drawings. Surely this is art criticism, and in two ways: the reflections are done in the presence of the illustrated works, and so invite the reader’s reflections on how Ingold’s thoughts illuminate the works; and the very manner and particulars of the unfolding process of Ingold’s writing is proposed as an analogy to Penone’s own manner of making as following, and so is interpretive, albeit in an unusually open-ended way.

     If indeed, pace Ingold, Correspondences is a collection of art criticism, one might think this is a symptom of a pervasive problem with Ingold’s self-understanding and manner of presentation of his work. In rejecting the hylomorphic model, Ingold rejects it wholesale. Since he views appeals to intention, function, and even meaning as part of the application of the hylomorphic model to art and making generally, he has no interest in recovering anything of value for these concepts in his correspondence conception. One way of seeing what is problematic about this lack of interest is to consider his few explicit remarks about art generally. In a number of places where Ingold discusses art, he focuses on the historic separation between the arts and technology, and aims to break open the conceptual barrier between the two. In Making art is one of the four ‘A’s’, along with anthropology, archaeology, and architecture; each of these is hitherto long afflicted by association with hylomorphism. Ingold never lingers over the question of what is distinctive about the arts, and the general impression conveyed is that art is a transient phase in the long trajectories of materials. Ingold offers a clue to his conception of art in noting that his piece ‘corresponding’ with Penone was particularly difficult to write: “The scholar’s verbal impulse to explicate continually threatens to unravel the dense weave of experience. But that, of course, is precisely the point. It is why there can be no substitute for art. Do not, then expect an explanation or interpretation, or that I should put the art in its social, cultural or historical context. I will have none of that. My purpose is to think with it.” (Correspondences, pp. 33-4) Here Ingold as usual rejects writing about art that aims at explanation, and he seems to suggest that there is a particular problem generally with writing about art, namely that artworks offer a relatively ‘dense weave of experience’, relative, that is, to other, non-artistic things. This thought is not without precedent: writers such as Wollheim and the art historian Philip Rawson have suggested that artworks have a kind of richness and resonance resulting from the ways in which artists create meaning in working; Wollheim explicitly wrote that the way that meaning enters a work of art is that the artist put it there. Ingold rejects talk of ‘putting’ meaning into a work as yet another malign instance of the hylomorphic conception, as if the artist takes a relatively meaningless artifact and imposes layers of meaning and significance.

     Are there then no resources in Ingold’s account to explicate how relatively dense experience arises, and how one might understand the difference between relatively sparse and relatively dense experience? It seems to me again that the piece on Penone offers an instance despite Ingold’s explicit rejection of (hylomorphic) meaning-talk. The first illustration of Penone’s work is of a drawing from 1987, ‘Respirare l’ombra’ [Breathe the shadow]. The work shows a very loosely and organically, faint, triangular outline, in a part of which occurs the Italian title in longhand writing. Inside the triangle near the upper apex is a leaf, out of which billows two long sacks or airy trails suggestive of organic matter and smoke. Ingold says nothing explicit about Penone’s drawing, but opens his piece with the following: “Imagine an inside-out world, where breath solidifies but the lungs are vaporized; where the shadow is a body and the body its shadow” and so forth until concluding with “where the forest ahs us at its fingertips or under its fingernails; where respiration is the rustling of leaves and the nervous system a thornbush.” (p. 33) Now, as noted above, Ingold’s marvelous imaginative prompting here fits comfortably within a standard aspect of art criticism, that is, of giving an evocative explication of some aspect of an artwork in the presence of the work (or at least of an illustration of the work). And further, the imaginative experiment is of a piece with Ingold’s most basic thoughts, as he goes on to indicate two pages later: “There are two halves to every body. One half is made of flesh, and wrapped in skin. That’s the half we can see. The other half, normally invisible to us, is made of air . . . In the woods, too, we tend to see only one half of every tree . . .Every surface is a fold in the fabric of the world.” (p. 35) Recall that for Ingold any entity is more properly thought of as a line, and any surface is a zone of contact and transmission within a meshwork of lines. So one might give a formula for Ingold’s ontology: Any phenomenon is a multiple of mutually affecting lines within an indeterminate field. This suggests that an imaginative project is always available: where there is presumptively an entity affected by other entities within a field, imagine instead that the first entity is rather the outside of a different entity. So instead of, say, me breathing, one imagines air circulating within the pulsating cavities of my lungs. To render, then, in an artwork this inversion of normal perspective is a way of enriching the experience of the phenomena. Is that not part of what Penone’s drawing does, that is, to render a certain Ingold-like imaginative act?

     If something like my suggestion is right, then at the very least Ingold has alerted the philosopher of art to a hitherto overlooked kind of procedure for creating artistic meaning. But so long as Ingold rejects any talk of intention, function, and meaning with regard to artworks, it is hard to see how he can make sense of this. It seems to me that the way forward would be, not to simply reject these concepts, but  to re-conceptualize their employment in artistic making in light of Ingold’s strictures against hylomorphism. In this project the philosopher of art and this most stimulating of anthropological theorists might learn something from each other.

--John Rapko

References and further relevant readings:

Aristotle, Physics

Gregory Bateson, Steps To an Ecology of Mind (1972)

Franz Boas, Primitive Art (1927)

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1987, originally in French 1980)

Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (2014)

Simon J. Evnine, Making Objects and Events: A Hylomorphic Theory of Artifacts, Actions, and Organisms (2016)

Clifford Geertz, ‘Art as a Cultural System’ in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973)

Alfred Gell, Art and Agency (1998)

Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (1935) in Poetry, Language, Thought (1971)

Tim Ingold, “Tool-use, sociality and intelligence” and “Technology, language, intelligence: A reconsideration of basic concepts” in Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution, edited by Kathleen R. Gibson and Tim Ingold (1993)

_____The Perception of the Environment (2000)

_____Being Alive (2011)

_____Making: anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture (2013)

_____”On Human Correspondence” in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (March 2017)

_____”Art and Anthropology for a Sustainable World” in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (December 2019)

_____Correspondences (2021)

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Wild Thought (2021, originally in French 1962)

Beth Preston, A Philosophy of Material Culture: Action, Function, and Mind (2013)

Philip Rawson, Drawing (1969)

Carlo Severi, The Chimera Principle (2015)

______Capturing Imagination: A Proposal for an Anthropology of Thought (2018)

Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (2020, originally in French 1964)

Richard Wollheim, “Aesthetics, anthropology and style: some programmatic remarks” in Art in Society (1978), edited by Michael Greenhalgh and Vincent Megaw

_____Painting as an Art (1987)

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.

__________________________________

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)