Some Philosophical Remarks on Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song (2022)

     Given their ubiquity in human cultures, and songs have attracted surprisingly little philosophical attention. In contrast to this paucity of attention, the philosophy of music generally is a well-established sub-field, at least in the Anglo-American academic world, with major orienting contributions from several philosophers of art including Jerrold Levinson. Much of this attends first of all to the question ‘What is Music?’, then to the question of what is musical expression. But is song an art form?

     On one view, there is nothing distinctive about song per se. Song is a kind of music, distinctive in that it uses words, but the use of words does not thereby place a piece into a different art form. Susanne Langer offered a forthright version of this view in claiming that there are “several great genera of art—plastic, musical, balletic, poetic,” and that each genus “creates a different kind of experience altogether; each may be said to make its own peculiar primary creation”, with music’s distinctive creation being “a purely audible time”. (Langer pp. 78-9) She grants that there are ‘complex’ kinds of art including song, but that even in cases where the poetry of Shakespeare or Goethe is set to music, the words “all become musical material” and “have been musically exploited”, with the result that “the poem as a poem has disappeared in the song.” (p. 84) Accordingly, though there may be certain kinds of internal complexity to art works, “there can be no hybrid works, belonging as much to one art as to another.” (p. 82)

     In his influential essay ‘Hybrid Art Forms’, Levinson denies the claim that there are no hybrid art forms, though not the claim that songs are fundamentally a kind of music with a distinctive internal complexity. He posits that we categorize art forms as either pure or hybrid. Paradigms of hybrid art forms are inter alia kinetic sculpture, concrete poetry, and opera. What makes them hybrid is not as it were their ontological diversity, because any art form can be seen as hybrid under a certain analytic scrutiny; one might absurdly consider oil painting as a hybrid art of shaping canvas and depositing pigment. Hybrid status, Levinson suggests, “is primarily a historical thing”; the relevant kind of complexity that is constitutive of hybrid status is that at least two of the materials used in a hybrid art are independently identifiable as emerging “out of a field of previously existing artistic activities” (Levinson, p. 27). On this account song is not a hybrid art because there is not an independent art of lyrics. In its central examples and in a vast range of cases trans-culturally and trans-historically the lyrics of songs are not an independent, non-musical art. Unfortunately, Levinson does not give sustained attention to oral poetry, and one might dispute, or at least severely qualify his by noting that a great deal of what is usually thought of as oral poetry is sung; as Albert Lord influentially put it, the improvising oral poet is the singer of tales. Levinson treats songs only in passing, where he says that “song has two dimensions, music and words” and that ‘traditional song’ is a ‘complex but nonhybrid’ art. He adds that “this does not prevent us from ahistorically viewing traditional song as a combination of poetry and music, a perspective that fits nineteenth-century lieder, however, better than Appalachian ballads or Balinese chant.” (p. 29 and n. 4) But since he has already argued that any art form can be as hybrid if viewed ahistorically, this qualification offers no insight into song. So one might follow Levinson in replacing the common sense characterization of song as a hybrid art form with the conception of it as a sui generis and complex art. But what if anything is the distinctive character of song? Perhaps Bob Dylan might help here.

       In his book The Philosophy of Modern Song Dylan offers short accounts of sixty-six songs in a particular performance. All but one song, Stephen Foster’s ‘Nelly was a Lady’ (as performed by Alvin Youngblood Hart) are from the twentieth-century, all but two are in English, with the large majority from performances recorded in the 1950s and 1960s. No one familiar with Dylan’s sensibility would be surprised to see that many of the choices are surprising; who could have guessed that Dylan would choose to discuss The Fugs’s ‘CIA Man’ or Vic Damone singing ‘On the Street Where You Live’? Some less surprising choices from the mainstreams of popular music include Marty Robbins’s ‘El Paso’, The Who’s ‘My Generation’, and The Clash’s ‘London Calling’. And given Dylan’s recent excruciating exploration of the American Songbook, there is an inevitability to the choice of Frank Sinatra’s ‘Strangers in the Night’. The discussions are brief, and mostly in two parts. A first part of a page or two addresses the reader as ‘you’ and rehearses the narrative of the song with existential elaborations. For example, the account of Bobby Darin’s ‘Beyond the Sea’ begins “IN THIS SONG YOUR HAPPINESS LIES beyond the wide sea, and to get there you have to cross the great unknown. You’re going out of bounds and you’re into the briny deep” and ends “No more cruising off into supernatural darkness. Never again you’ll go sailing, you lay it all down and pull the shade. You quit while you’re ahead.” (Dylan (2022), pp. 85-6) A second part of perhaps at most a few short pages shifts to the third person address and offers anything and everything Dylan thinks relevant: mostly facts about the song or the singer mostly and reflections on their importance, but also social commentary and homespun advice, including some thoughts on the superiority of polygamy to monogamy. In a minority of instances the first part addressing the reader is omitted, and in one case the text is only of the first kind. The longest entries total eight pages, with the shortest being a few sentences on Little Richard. There are also a great many photos throughout the book, with varying degrees of appropriateness to the neighboring text.

     I cannot imagine a reader whose prior familiarity with the songs and personal reflections upon them would make reading the book pointless. For this reviewer the great revelation was Dylan’s account of The Osborne Brothers’ ‘Ruby, Are You Mad?, along with a viewing of their performance of it at Newport in 1966. But aside from a seemingly unordered series of Dylan’s interests and reflections, surely worth the time and effort of anyone interested in Dylan or post-World War II American song, what does the book offer? And in particular, does Dylan present anything on the philosophy of modern song, or of song generally, that would motivate and justify the title?

     The book has neither an introduction nor a free-standing conclusion. But the book does end with what must be taken as his explicit philosophical statement of the nature and importance of song. The last song discussed is Dion’s ‘Where or When’, which Dylan identifies as ‘a song of reincarnation’, (p. 326) and he concludes with a credo: “it [music] is of a time but also timeless; a thing with which to make memories and the memory itself. Though we seldom consider it, music is built in time as surely as a sculptor or welder works in physical space. Music transcends time by living within it, just as reincarnation allows us to transcend life by living it again and again.” (p. 334) Dylan’s topics, then, are those of the great stream of thought that subtends philosophy and religion: time and timelessness; memory; construction; mortality and immortality. Forty pages earlier he gives what seems the only other explicitly philosophical remark, a rejection of the idea that the intended and appropriate reception of a song involves the hearer’s understanding of it: “Like any other piece of art, songs are not seeking to be understood. Art can be appreciated or interpreted but there is seldom anything to understand.” (pp. 298-99) How might we take these brief statements of perennial themes in relation to the great bulk of the book, with its fierce addresses to ‘you’ and small clouds of facts and reflections surrounding particular performances of particular songs?

     Now the idea that philosophical reflection can consist in examination of particulars is familiar from the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who suggested that philosophy need not consist in advancing and arguing for theses, but rather could range across particular examples, whether real or imagined, with the aim of giving a perspicuous representation of some problematic area of human interest. The inaugurating question of philosophical inquiry would be ‘I don’t know my way around’; and the aim of the consequent inquiry is not to provide some piece of information that would guide one towards some goal (‘turn left at the light, go straight for a mile, and you’ll see the philosophy department’s building on your right), but rather to provide something of a sense of how the landmarks and paths in the relevant area are related. Success consists not in solving but in dissolving the problem. Schematically, the philosophical inquiry consists in (a) recognition of the problematic character of phenomenon, (b) investigation of particulars and mapping of their relations to the point where (c) the phenomenon is perspicuously represented and clarified. If one were to apply this schema to Dylan’s book, one could (a’) follow the title identify ‘modern song’ as the phenomenon, but what is the problem? And how (b’) what sort counts as illumination of particulars and their interrelations?

     It seems to me that Dylan offers outstandingly interesting answers to these questions, but to see what they are one must first turn to his earlier prose, both his autobiography Chronicles and his Nobel Prize lecture. Scattered across the Chronicles is a succinct account of how Dylan developed his distinctive poetics of song writing. The motivations to write are various and arise obscurely: “Opportunities may come along for you to convert something—something that exists into something that didn’t yet. That might be the beginning of it. Sometimes you just want to do things your way, want to see for yourself what lies behind the misty curtain . . . You want to write songs that are bigger than life. You want to say something about strange things that have happened to you, strange things you have seen. You have to know and understand something and then go past the vernacular.” (Dylan (2004), p. 51) A negative model is the three-minute song, something that is ‘without memory’ and is of a piece with the mainstream of American culture’s attack on the capacity for and exercise of attention. (pp. 55-6) Woody Guthrie provides a positive model, but one that is not appropriate to contemporary circumstances. An encounter with Brecht/Weill’s ‘Pirate Jenny’ shows Dylan how to build up a kind of formal richness in song that requires the exercise of memory: “it was the form, the free verse association, the structure and disregard for the known certainty of melodic patterns to make it seriously matter, give it its cutting edge. It also had the ideal chorus for the lyrics.” (pp. 275-6) The chorus is a single line at the end of each verse, a line whose meaning and resonance is inflected differently with each occurrence (‘Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again’, ‘It’s all over now, Baby Blue’, ‘Desolation Row’ . . . ) Mike Seeger provides another powerfully attractive negative model, a trap because its adherence to a range of folk traditions: “it dawned on me that I might have to change my inner thought patterns . . . that I would have to start believing in possibilities that I wouldn’t have allowed before, that I had been closing my creativity down to a very narrow, controllable scale . . . that things had become too familiar and I might have to disorientate myself.” (p. 71) Like the young Bertolt Brecht, Dylan’s exemplar of disorientation comes from Arthur Rimbaud and in particularly his proclamation “Je est un autre.” (p. 288)

     The last directive comes from listening to the blues singer Robert Johnson, whose songs “were perfected pieces—each song contained four or five verses, every couplet intertwined with the next but in no obvious way. They were so utterly fluid. At first they went by quick too quick to even get. They jumped all over the place in range and subject matter, short punchy verses that resulted in some panoramic story—fires of mankind blasting off the surface of this spinning piece of plastic.”  (p. 282) Such is the formation of what Timothy Hampton has recently called Dylan’s ‘poetics’, his working ideologies—the sense of what is to be done and how to do it; the models to emulate and the examples to avoid; and what counts as success, with its implications and limits. (This summary of Dylan’s account in Chronicles differs in parts from Hampton’s reconstruction; for example, Hampton divides Dylan’s work into phases, with Guthrie as an initial model, one that is replaced in the mid-1960s by Rimbaud). A further suggestion from Hampton helps with the term ‘modern’ in the book’s title, something that is unmentioned in the book’s text. Hampton argues that Dylan must be treated as a modern artist on the philosopher Stanley Cavell’s influential conception. Cavell argued in late 1960s that recent artists are afflicted with a distinctive problem of comprehensibility to their audiences. On the one hand, the advanced modernist artist is engaged among other things with practices marked by the ideologies of progressivism and technical experimentation; but on the other hand this leads to products that their immediate audience finds incomprehensible. Cavell calls this ‘the burden of modernism’ and suggests that under such a burden “You often do not know which is on trial, the object of the viewer”. (Cavell, pp. 187 and 190) Hence on Hampton’s account Dylan as a modernist artist, and by extension in the practices of distinctively modern song, the artist must construct their poetics, and without knowing in advance that they would find and re-find an audience, as Dylan did in the early-mid 1960s.

     Dylan’s account of the formation of his poetics raises the question: what is Dylan’s aesthetics? That is, what sort of response from listeners characterizes a successful song? In Chronicles, the Nobel Lecture, and The Philosophy of Modern Song Dylan characterizes the most powerful sort of response as being struck and then transported into a different world, but one that is one’s own world illuminated and clarified. In the Lecture he describes first hearing a Leadbelly record that included ‘Cotton Fields’: “And that record changed my life right then and there. Transported me into a world I’d never known. It was like an explosion went off. Like I’d been walking in darkness and all of a sudden the darkness was illuminated. It was like somebody laid hands on me.” (Dylan (2017), pp. 2-3) This sense of the listener transformed shows Rimbaud to be the governing figure of the aesthetics as well as the poetics. The phrase “like somebody laid hands on me” suggests one motivation for the second-person address in Philosophy: as a voice from elsewhere, more powerful than the listener, the successful song addresses the reader directly and existentially, and the listener identifies for a time with the world of the song and its narrator. Later in the Lecture discusses three great literary works that provided him with thematic material and resonances for songs, Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Odyssey. Dylan summarizes Moby Dick in the third person, then shifts into the second person for All Quiet on the Western Front: “This is a book where you lose your childhood, your faith in a meaningful world, and your concern for individuals.” (p. 12) And then as if to prefigure the play of address in Philosophy, he begins the summary of The Odyssey in the third person, then shifts to the second (“In a lot of ways, some of these same things have happened to you. You too have had drugs dropped into your wine. You too have shared a bed with the wrong woman” (p. 20)), and then reverts to the third (“And that’s still not all of it. When he gets back home, things aren’t any better” (p. 21)).

     Dylan’s determined insistence upon including and shifting between second- and third-person address suggests that the philosophy of song includes both the examination of the immersive appeal of particulars and reflections upon their wider contexts; and further, that neither immersion alone nor reflection with experience offers an adequate account of what matters in song. And so too with Dylan’s themes: neither the experience in time, nor timeless understanding, but rather the thought of re-incarnation provides the minimal conceptual complexity required to grasp the experience of songs.—If something like this is right, then The Philosophy of Modern Songs presents a philosophical method for the arts that is not obviously inferior to any competing academic models known to me.

References:

Stanley Cavell, ‘Music Discomposed in Must We Mean What We Say? (1969)

Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (2004)

-----The Nobel Lecture (2017)

-----The Philosophy of Modern Song (2022)

Timothy Hampton, Bob Dylan’s Poetics (2019)

Suzanne Langer, ‘Deceptive Analogies: Specious and Real Relationships Among the Arts’ in Problems of Art (1957)

Jerrold Levinson, ‘Hybrid Art Forms’ in Music, Art, & Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics (1990)

Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales (1960)

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953)

Genres and Art Forms in Contemporary Art?: On Paul Crowther’s Theory of the Art Object, Conclusion:

     In four previous blog posts I have considered Paul Crowther’s recent book Theory of the Art Object, with a focus on his account of sculpture. A guiding question has been: Can Crowther’s account, or indeed any account of art and art forms that starts by drawing distinctions between painting as a two-dimensional art and sculpture as a three-dimensional art, make sense of the novel kinds of artworks characteristic of contemporary visual art? As argued in the first part of this review, Rosalind Krauss’s canonical account of recent sculpture collapses upon examination. Further reflection suggests that her account needs, but does not offer, an account of spatial arts so that the idea of an ‘expanded field’ might gain some determinate sense; then the ‘field’ that is ‘expanded’ would be the field of spatial arts. Having examined Crowther’s conceptions of sculpture, assemblage, and installation in some detail, and having considered some conceptually challenging works of Giuseppe Penone, I’ll conclude by considering three questions: A. Is Crowther’s account superior to its competitors? B. Does Crowther’s account provide a basic conceptual repertoire sufficient for making sense of contemporary sculpture? And C. Why might one think that understanding contemporary visual art so much as requires an account of art forms generally, and of sculpture in particular?

     A’. Much of art criticism, theorizing, and philosophizing about contemporary visual art proceeds in the absence of any articulate account of traditional art forms such as painting, drawing, and sculpture. Considerably more attention has been given to presumptively novel art forms such as video, installation, and digital art, although theorizing about such new art forms is rarely if ever accompanied by considerations of what makes a form an art form, or what characteristics art forms have generally. So a conception of spatial arts that would fill the lacuna in Krauss’s account is not readily available. As discussed in an earlier post, Crowther’s own account stands in a long, though sparsely populated, tradition of accounts of sculpture beginning with Herder’s in the second half of the eighteenth century. One problem that plagues this tradition is its adventitious concern with the sense of touch, and correlatively the alleged existence of distinctively tactile values specific to sculpture.

     To my knowledge the only recent potential competitor to Crowther’s account is one offered about twenty years ago by the philosopher Robert Hopkins, itself based upon indications from Susanne Langer a half century before. Langer characterizes sculpture as follows: “A piece of sculpture is a center of three-dimensional space. It is a virtual kinetic volume, which dominates a surrounding space, and this environment derives all proportions and relations from it, as the actual environment does from one’s self . . . Sculpture is literally the image of kinetic volume in sensory space.” (Langer pp. 91-2, as quoted in Hopkins) Hopkins considers at length every point in Langer’s characterization and invokes potential counter-examples, especially abstract sculptures the application to which of the core sculptural characteristic of possessing ‘a virtual kinetic volume’ seems especially obscure. A particular problem is locating and explicating what is ‘kinetic’ in the sculpture: is it the work qua work, or the work’s subject, that is, what is represented by the work? And if the latter, then how does a Langer-type account make sense of abstract sculpture? Still, he thinks Langer’s account is illuminating, but needs at least three major qualifications: (a) At points Langer seems to recognize, very much in the manner of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that “all visual experience is experience of ‘kinetic volume’, i.e. is permeated by a sense of possible movement and action. And this includes pictorial experience, the experience in which we grasp the content of pictures.” But at other points, including in her explicit account of sculpture just cited, she seems to treat the perception of sculpture as distinctive in its recruitment of corporeality and movement. Consequently, (b) Langer has failed to clarify the core experience of sculpture, that is, the viewer’s encounter with a three-dimensional work, and a fortiori has failed to note and explicate the role of the imagination in this encounter. On Hopkins account the distinction between pictorial seeing and sculptural seeing has more to do with the kind of concern with ‘organization’ invoked by sculpture. This sort of imaginative activity has to do with the viewer’s centrally imaging the sculpture’s potentials for movement. Hopkins ruefully notes that this characteristic in turn requires explication that he cannot provide, but still thinks “that nonetheless our grasp on Langer’s account is sufficiently tight for us to assess it.” A key point of this assessment is (c), the scope of such an account. Hopkins suggests “that the notion of sculpture is subject to too many pressures—from the etiology of the works in question, the form of representation they exhibit, and indeed the aesthetic satisfactions they offer—for the class to be genuinely unified.”

     Comparing Langer’s/Hopkins’s account of sculpture with Crowther’s, one might well think that the former account adds nothing that is not in Crowther’s account, and that further Crowther offers a richer conceptual repertoire for understanding contemporary sculpture. The central notion of Langer’s account, that of ‘virtual kinetic form’, remains unclarified, as Hopkins himself insists. The Langer/Hopkins account offers no analogue or replacement for Crowther’s insistence of the kind of making involved as central to the understanding of what makes a practice an art form. Crowther’s account explicitly acknowledges the limitations of scope that Hopkins notes in (c). And whereas Hopkins’s account simply considers an unordered array of potential counter-examples, Crowther’s account, in its distinctions of sculpture from assemblage and installation, offers the kind of historically sensitive finer grain that must be included in explanations of contemporary visual art.

     B’. Can Crowther’s account then make sense of the distinctive forms and contents of contemporary sculpture? The answer is given in my consideration in the previous post of Penone’s sculpture. What is further needed for such explanations is some recognition of the way that in much modern and contemporary sculptural art the very framework for the intelligibility the artwork becomes part of the explicit content of the piece. In addition to the points from Fisher and Steinberg discussed in my previous post, the philosopher David Davies has urged a similar point with regard to recent art generally: working out the possible meanings of a ‘late-modern’ piece “take[s] the form of a narrative which serves not merely to contextualize an artistic vehicle, but to identify what the artistic vehicle is, given what is presented to the receiver in the gallery. It is, I think distinctive of late modern art that such an identifying narrative is required to make an individual piece available for appreciation, whereas in the case of traditional works, no such narrative is necessary for individual works since the identify of the artistic vehicle is given by an understanding of the artistic medium to which the work belongs.” (Davies, pp. 152-3) If something like these points urged by Fisher, Steinberg, and Davies are right, then Crowther’s account of sculpture, in particular of the typical content of contemporary sculptures, needs supplementing with concepts of practice, series, and concept/conceptual art; but I cannot see that any part of his account as given needs radical revision or replacement.

C’. And finally, why bother with traditional art forms like sculpture in thinking about contemporary visual art? Much contemporary theorizing about the visual arts seems to presuppose one of the following: either the concept of art is useless or even harming in thinking about contemporary cultural works; or the basic conceptual structure required for explanation is just the concept of art plus individual artworks; or the previous needs supplementing with just two recent super-genres, installation and performance. One point to consider is that in practice (so it seems to me) there is no sharp boundary among the concepts of art form, genre, and (artistic uses of a) medium. Some writers use one of these terms, some another, and some treat two or more as extensionally equivalent. Sometimes the term ‘genre’ is used for the broadest artistic classifications within the concept of art; Langer, for example, refers to tragedy and comedy as genres. So another point to consider is that the point of invoking genres in explanations applies mutatis mutandis to art forms like sculpture. Existing accounts of genre are particularly rich and well-developed, owing perhaps to the canonical formulations given by Northrop Frye in The Anatomy of Criticism. There Frye argued that the core of an artistic genre is what he called ‘the radical of presentation’, which is a particular configuration among artist, work, and audience; Frye gives particular emphasis on the kind of audience invoked, as Tzvetan Todorov noted in his influential critical account of Frye.  One recognizes immediately that Crowther’s account of sculpture conforms to the model of the radical of presentation. Todorov supplies a key point for assessing the importance of the concept of genre and by extension the concept of art form: “failing to recognize the existence of genres is equivalent to claiming that a literary work does not bear any relationship to already existing works. Genres are precisely those relay-points by which the work assumes a relation with the universe of literature.” (Todorov, p. 8) And likewise with sculpture: invoking the art form of sculpture in the context of contemporary visual art brings in train something of the history of sculpture, and so the concern with the range and types of sculptural achievement, orienting models and counter-models, of possible latent values in contemporary works, and the sense of alternatives. Accordingly, the currently unfashionable invocation of histories of genres and art forms in interpreting, understanding, evaluating, and appreciating contemporary visual art might well be thought of as in the service of re-vivifying for our desolate world something of the most central pleasures in the arts. As Meyer Schapiro put it, these include the pleasures of collective and cooperative seeing out which arise kinds of intense and revelatory experiences not otherwise available: “Critical seeing, aware of the incompleteness of perception, is explorative and dwells on details as well as on the large aspects that we call the whole. It takes into account others’ seeing; it is a collective and cooperative seeing and welcomes comparison of different perceptions and judgments. It also knows moments of sudden revelation and intense experience of unity and completeness which are shared in others’ scrutiny.” (Schapiro, p. 49) Part of the achievement of Crowther’s book is to contribute to the possible re-vivification of such experiences.

References:

Paul Crowther, Theory of the Art Object (2020)

David Davies, ‘Telling Pictures: The Place of Narrative in Late Modern ‘Visual Art’’, in Philosophy and Conceptual Art (2007), ed. Peter Goldie and Elizabeth Schellekens

Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957)

Robert Hopkins, ‘Sculpture and Space’ in Imagination, Philosophy and the Arts (2003), ed. Matthew Kieran and Dominic Lopes

Suzanne Langer, Feeling and Form (1953)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (1945)

Meyer Schapiro, ‘On Perfection, Coherence, and Unity of Form and Content’ (1966) in Theory and Philosophy of Art; Style, Artist, and Society (1994)

Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1973)

Contemporary Sculpture in extremis: On Paul Crowther’s Theory of the Art Object, Part 2.3

     In my previous posts on Paul Crowther’s recent book Theory of the Art Object I have sketched his general account of art forms and given particular attention to his account of the spatial arts of sculpture, assemblage, and installation. Very briefly and crudely summarized, Crowther claims that each art form involves a characteristic manner of making; a characteristic rhetoric, that is a way of addressing and soliciting attention from a viewer; and a characteristic version of a ‘poetics of finitude’ wherein the viewer is offered conceptions of self, world, and their interrelations. (See my previous posts for fuller and more accurate summaries with some explication.) Crowther takes account of novel kinds of spatial art of the last half-century in adding accounts of assemblage and installation as art forms distinct from sculpture. To see whether and how his account contributes to the understanding of distinctively contemporary art forms, I now consider the work of the Italian sculptor Giuseppe Penone, in particular an early work of his that presents some challenges to understanding that are not unusual in contemporary art.

     Penone’s work as an artistic sculptor begins in the late 1960s and continues to the present. From early on he was associated with other Italian artists in the movement Arte Povera, which like other contemporaneous movements globally attempted to make artworks that were not strictly bound to the prevailing artworld institutions of studios, galleries, and museums, and that consisted of materials not traditionally accredited as vehicles of artistic meaning. In a sense, much of Penone’s work uses wood, but to say so invites misunderstanding, as his primary materials are not woods but rather trees, and the elemental forces of gravity, wind, and light that shape them and render their appearance accessible and attractive. After his years as a student in the 1960s, Penone’s sculptural work proper begins with the series Maritime Alps in 1968, works that individually consist of what Germano Celant calls “direct interventions on trees and landscapes” in the woods near Penone’s parents’ home. (Celant, p. 41) The works survive primarily in photographic documentation: Penone weaves together saplings (I Have Interwoven Three Trees); Penone loosely wraps with wire that marks the points where he had first clung to a tree (The Growing Tree Will Remember the Points of My Contact); and likewise a kind of signature work involving Penone grasping the trunk of a tree with his right hand, then installing a similarly-shaped steel hand in the very place Penone had grasped (It Will Continue to Grow Except at That Point); etc.

     Despite the non-traditional character of Penone’s works, Penone identifies himself as a sculptor, and this self-identification is unproblematic in the broad context of contemporary art. Why is that? One reason is that Penone has worked out a plausible and attractive re-conceptualization of sculpture that draws upon well-established and durable conceptions of sculptural activity. Such durable conceptions include the idea that sculpture is to be contrasted with painting and drawing as three-dimensional to two-dimensional art forms. Another conception is that sculptural making divides into two great sub-classes, carving and modeling. In the former the artist treats the material as containing within it some already articulated and determinate form, and knocks away the unnecessary covering materials with an instrument that is harder and/or more powerful than the worked material; in the latter the artist treats the material as something relatively formless and indeterminate, and (as with carving) gives form to it with something relatively hard or powerful, whether it be the artist’s hands shaping the material or a form into which the material is pressed or poured. As Georges Didi-Huberman puts it in his monograph on the artist, Penone re-conceptualizes all materials as fundamentally temporal, ‘like a river’, so that their character qua shaped is recognizable yet unfixed and subject to development and decay. This re-conceptualization maintains contact with sculpture’s traditional three-dimensionality. And the further conception common to carving and modeling follows in train; as Didi-Huberman quotes Penone himself: “The stone itself is fluid: a mountain crumbles, becomes sand. It is only a question of time. It’s the short duration of our existence which leads us to deem a certain material as being either “hard” or “soft.” Sculpture is founded upon the approach of a hard element and a soft element—in this case it’s the chisel which penetrates into the wood.” (Didi-Huberman p. 51) And accordingly nothing in this re-conceptualization resists Crowther’s conceptualization of sculpture in its three-dimensional nature, its aesthetic address to a viewer, and its so-to-speak native range of instances of the poetics of finitude.

    But consider another piece from the Maritime Alps series: My Height, the Length of My Arms, and My Width in a Stream. Like the other pieces in the series, it exists as a photographic documentation. The physical piece was a frame of the dimensions indicated in the title and, as likewise indicated, placed on the bed of a shallow stream; the photo shows the water moving over the frame, placed in a stream barely wider than itself. This work seems to be very much a part of and artistically consistent with the other pieces in Maritime Alps; yet it seems to me that it does not evidently fit in with Crowther’s conception of sculpture. Both Celant and the art historian Elizabeth Mangini seem hesitant to refer to this piece as a sculpture; Celant refers to it as an ‘intervention’, and Mangini as an ‘object’ or ‘event’. (Mangini, p. 22) One way of putting the difference between the relevant conception of artistic sculpture and the conception embodied by the piece is that instead of showing the result of bringing the relatively hard and/or powerful force to the relatively malleable material, it stages that process. The conceptually prior stage of the artistic process seems to be something like this: (a) Penone has conceptualized the piece; (b) he has translated the dimensions of his body with arms extended into a frame; and (c) he has placed the frame in the stream. (a)-(c) do not express the sculptural process as given in Crowther’s conception. Rather, the piece in its ‘finished’ form presents that process. Why does this matter?

     It seems to me that the staging of a process as traditionally conceived is a characteristic aspect of works in contemporary art; consider, among many possible examples, Richard Serra’s works that aim to present various verbs (‘to mark’; ‘to grasp’; ‘to fold’; etc.) that express aspects of artistic making. One might agree that Crowther’s conception may be invoked as part of the explanation of any number of works of contemporary sculpture, yet also think that further explanatory resources are needed to make sense of the distinctively contemporary aspect of such works. What might further be needed for explanation? Consider a work from the dawn of contemporary art, certainly vastly better known from verbal descriptions than from actual viewing, Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953). This work of course consists of a faintly smudged piece of paper that is the result of Rauschenberg spending weeks erasing a pencil and crayon drawing by Willem de Kooning, a drawing that at Rauschenberg’s request de Kooning donated for that purpose. Seemingly it is an instance, far from unique, of recent art whose meaning is exhausted by a verbal description and an evaluation of it as a neo-Dadaist stunt.  But its meaning is much richer than one might initially think, and grasping the piece’s range of meaning and recognizing its distinctively contemporary kinds of meaningfulness helps illuminate a surprising range of contemporary visual art. In a monograph on Rauschenberg he art historian Leo Steinberg puzzles over the piece at length, and comes to see its significance it what it expresses about the trans-personal and cross-generational nature of artistic making under contemporary conditions. Asked about the motivation for the piece, Rauschenberg explained: “I was trying to make art, and so therefore I had to erase art.” (quoted in Steinberg, p. 21) Although Steinberg claims with repeated viewings to find the piece “ever less interesting to look at,” nonetheless “the decision behind it never ceases to fascinate and expand.” (p. 22) One part of its significance, so Steinberg suggests, is in the ways it illuminates the interactions, mediated by works and their making, between members of the same cross-generational practice. So the work of the earlier practitioner is a gift to the later practitioner, whose work in response returns the gift. The later artist to a degree repeats the gestures of the earlier artist; here this repetition is made literal in the way Rauschenberg’s strokes of erasure follow de Kooning’s strokes of marking. The other part of its expanding significance is the way that the piece marks a decisive break. The gestural power of de Kooning is part of an historical continuum displaying a “virtuoso capacity for three-dimensional visualization” that is unbroken since Michelangelo. Rauschenberg’s piece marks a break and announces “the ineluctable obsolescence of the power of mind and hand embodied” in a Michelangelo drawing, an obsolescence evident in the world of digital art, installation, and video. (ibid)

     And mutatis mutandis for sculpture: perhaps part of what is missing from Crowther’s account with regard to sculpture is the recognition that sculpture, like all arts, are essentially historical phenomena; and further that part of the distinctiveness of contemporary sculpture is that among its basic bits of ideology is its seemingly paradoxical historical sense as something ahistorical that makes sense in part because it is after a long and venerable tradition. Later Steinberg notes that “[i]n retrospect the most clownish of Rauschenberg’s youthful pranks take on a kind of stylistic consistency,” and the Erased de Kooning Drawing comes to seem as a prefiguration of Rauschenberg’s mature conception of the ‘flat-bed picture plane’, that is, a conception of a picture as not the visual analogue of vertical, upright human perceiver, but rather as a metaphor for and instance of a plane that has been worked upon as a horizontal surface, and only turned vertical as a convenience of display. (pp. 36-8; for his classic account of the flat-bed picture plane see Steinberg 1972)

     Steinberg’s insight that it is only in retrospect and in light of the Rauschenberg’s later work that Erased de Kooning Drawing takes on a fuller sense points to another dimension of meaningfulness in contemporary sculpture is left unexplicated in Steinberg’s monograph; so for illumination one turns to the account offered by the literary historian Philip Fisher in his book Making and Effacing Art. Fisher notes that modern works of art arise within “a culture of intellectualized criticism”. In the early twentieth-century much of this criticism is provided by artists themselves in the forms of manifestoes and other verbal explanations. Later this explanatory verbiage is supplied by a cadre of professional critics, whose essential task “is to historicize the present, to imagine it as the future’s past, and by that act to give or deny value to the individual work or artistic career.” (Fisher p. 90) This historicization becomes “a peculiarly modern form of content”, and so the “production of horizons for seeing works goes hand in hand with the manufacture of the works themselves.” The chief mechanism through which artists self-historicize is by working in sequences or series, what Fisher calls ‘the strategy of the future’s past’ wherein the individual work of art becomes “a step within a sequence that anyone living at that moment of the future will think of as its past.” (p. 91) Fisher’s own account of the Rauschenberg piece is largely limited to its destructive aspect in announcing the obsolescence of the past, but he also recognizes that interest of Rauschenberg’s act “depends on the trap that it designs to capture the idea of series and succession in art.” (p. 99) This further recognition by Fisher echoes part of Steinberg’s point, but crucially adds the idea of the work existing in a series, “an immensely satisfying short-term rational structure” that can imitates the technological model of a ‘breakthrough’ in offering what Fisher calls (following George Kubler) ‘Prime Objects’, striking works of invention that become exemplary for further practices. Putting Steinberg’s and Fisher’s accounts together, one might say that Erased de Kooning Drawing is one of the Prime Objects in Rauschenberg’s oeuvre, one whose significance was unavailable at the time of its making and initial display, but which gains ‘in retrospect’ its fuller meaningfulness by virtue of the role it comes to play as a kind of manifesto object, a ‘horizon for seeing’ that guides attention to Rauschenberg’s work. The reader will have guessed that I am suggesting that Penone’s My Height, the Length of My Arms, and My Width in a Stream plays much the same role in the Maritime Alps and indeed in Penone’s work as a whole.

     If this suggestion is plausible, then my further suggestion is that the example of Penone permits us to see the sense in which My Height, the Length of My Arms, and My Width in a Stream is a work of sculpture. It is an ‘expanded’ sense, though not in Rosalind Krauss’s sense as explicated in my first blog post on Crowther’s book. The work is integral to the sculptural series Martime Alps, with the individual work and the series of which it is a part illuminating each other. It is by playing the role of Prime Object that this ‘intervention’, ‘event’, or ‘object’ becomes a sculptural work. The example suggests a further dimension of meaningfulness that will need to be added to Crowther’s account of sculpture, along with a historical dimension, in order that it captures the distinctiveness of contemporary work: the concepts of series and oeuvre.

     In my final post on Crowther’s book, I will contrast his account of sculpture with a recent alternative account offered by Robert Hopkins, itself based on suggestions from Susanne Langer, and then by way of conclusion reflect on the role of genre in explanations of contemporary visual art.

References:

Germano Celant et alia, Giuseppe Penone: The Hidden Life Within (2013)

Paul Crowther, Theory of the Art Object (2020)

Georges Didi-Huberman, Being a Skull: Site, Contact, thought, Sculpture (2016)

Philip Fisher, Making and Effacing Art (1991)

Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ (1977)

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

Clare Lilley et alia, Giuseppe Penone: A Tree in the Wood (2018)

Elizabeth Mangini, Seeing Through Closed Eyelids: Giuseppe Penone and the Nature of Sculpture (2021)

Giuseppe Penone, Giuseppe Penone: writings 1968-2008 (2009)

Leo Steinberg, Encounters with Rauschenberg (2000)

----Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (1972)

‘Get to work!’: On Jerry Saltz’s How to Be an Artist

     On all accounts, Jerry Saltz is currently the best known art critic in the United States. I have no idea how many people know who he is, nor what sub-set of those who know of him have read his writings, nor what sub-sub-set have read a non-negligible percentage of them with care. But I would think that many among them know Saltz’s life-trajectory. Having attempted and abandoned a career as an artist in early adulthood, Saltz worked a variety of jobs, most notably as a long-distance truck driver, for many years. Around the age of 40 he began writing art criticism, and eventually was hired as the regular art critic for the Village Voice. Two published volumes preserve his major pieces from 1998 through 2009. For the past decade he has been the senior art critic for New York magazine and its on-line so-called ‘entertainment site’, Vulture. And on all accounts, two events have made him exceptionally well known. First he appeared in his role as an art critic in a short-lived television show, Work of Art: The Next Great Artist. Second, he has developed large followings on Facebook and especially Instagram, with hundreds to thousands of people ‘liking’ his posts, and dozens to hundreds of them commenting. And so finally on all accounts his status as best known American art critic results not from his writings, or his professing some fashionable doctrine, or some broad and keen interest in his accounts of contemporary artists and artworks; but rather this status is indissociably bound to his prominence in broadcast and social media. His life-trajectory is known as a consequence of his tireless public rehearsing of it in these media.

     Although Saltz claims to avoid much of the international circuit of biennials and art fairs that gives contemporary visual art so much of its social physiognomy and talking points, he is as well placed as anyone to reflect upon the distinctive characteristics of the contemporary art world, its products, and the social roles internal to it, the roles assigned to curators, gallerists, critics, and of course artists. And so we are perhaps fortunate that his status as a social media celebrity has induced him to write a short book, How to Be an Artist, something that reveals not just what he takes to be involved in becoming an artist, but also what is distinctively contemporary about recent artists, and what virtues and practices they must develop to sustain themselves as artists. Saltz then offers in passing and with the lightest possible touch an account of contemporary art. What does he say?

     A great deal of the book is couched as guidance for those wishing to begin to make art works, then to sustain their practice of making, and then finally to somehow enter the contemporary art world. The prose is mostly in the standard manner of a self-help book, addressing the reader directly as ‘you’, and filled with countless short imperative sentences: ‘Get to work!’; ‘You can start anytime’; ‘Get lost!’; ‘Vivisect yourself’; and on and on. The short book contains six sections, or ‘steps’: the first two about getting started making art; then one about ‘learning to think like an artist (Saltz notes that ‘this is the fun part’); then two about entering and surviving the art world; and a final odd section about ‘attaining galactic brain’ that concludes with the advice to go dancing once a year. I think one could fairly summarize the content of the book as a short series of injunctions (very much in Saltz’s own manner): 1. Just start making art. 2. Explore and play with alternative subjects, manners of rendering, and media. 3. Keep making art, even if you think it’s no good and no one likes it. 4. Be yourself, but even more so, exaggerate yourself. 5. Try to expand your social contacts in the arts; you will need at least twelve.—That’s it. Feel free to send me the money that you would have otherwise spent buying the book.

     So much for the advice, which takes up perhaps 98% of the short text. What of Saltz’s artistic conceptions? Saltz initially characterizes art as follows: “One way to think about art is that it’s a visual language—usually non-verbal, arguably pre-verbal—with the power to tell us more in the blink of an eye (Augenblick, in German) than we might learn in hours of listening or reading. It is a means of expression that conveys the most primal emotions: lonesomeness, silence, pain, the whole vast array of human sensation.” (pp. ix-x) So by the term ‘art’ Saltz means something like ‘static visual art’, and he thinks that such art ‘tells us something’ in particular about the emotions (though he bizarrely includes sensations and silence among the emotions). Artworks “should express thought and emotion,” and characteristically do this by ‘embedding’ thought in material. (p. 41) In good artworks (as the popular singer Jay-Z puts it), the materials “do more work than they normally do” and “work on more than one level.” (p. 43) Accordingly, “[a] work of art is a rich estuary of material, personal, public, and aesthetic ideas.” (p. 70) Artworks arise through the exercise of the imagination, whose energy arises “from love—love of doing something”, including for example love of painting (p. 9) In sustaining oneself as an artist three virtues are helpful: persistence obviously, but also obstinacy and determination. (p. 99) There is only one vice, envy; to avoid this the artist need only “grow a backbone and get back to work.” (p. 100) Artists are successful qua artists if they have time to do their work. (p. 87)

     A moment’s reflection reveals the obscurities and incoherences in Saltz’s set of conceptions. For example, the main part of his statements suggest quite plausibly that a typical artistic failure is the failure to make a work that embodies thought through putting materials to relatively extended kinds of uses; whereas his explicit statement is that the only failure in the arts is the artist’s inability to find or make time to make art. Likewise, the idea that the good contemporary artist works across a variety of media seems to conflict with his claim that an archetypal motivation for art-making is love of working in a particular medium such as painting. Further, Saltz offers no consideration, here or as far as I know elsewhere, of alternative conceptions of artistic practice. Nor does he consider here what makes the arts important in life (though his forthcoming book is alarmingly titled Art is Life), nor here or elsewhere the character of modern life that provides the framework of intelligibility for contemporary visual art. Lacking consideration of different conceptions of artistic practice, his statements float in an atmosphere of vagueness, although that might be required for Saltz’s stated audience, the anyone and everyone who thinks of becoming an artist, to find something in them. Beyond noting these evident problems and lacunae, how might one reflect on and evaluate Saltz’s conceptions of the artist, of sustaining artistic practice, and of contemporary visual art?

     One route is provided by Alasdair MacIntyre’s influential conception of a practice, first introduced and explicated in his celebrated book After Virtue (1981). On MacIntyre’s proposal (in one lengthy sentence), a practice is “any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.” (MacIntyre (1981), p. 175) There are two kinds of goods internal to practices: the excellence of the products that result from the practice; and the goods for an individual that arise from living a life of a practitioner of a worthwhile practice (MacIntyre’s example is this latter internal good is artistic: “it is the painter’s living out of a greater or lesser part of his or her life as a painter that is the second kind of good internal to painting.” (p. 175)) There are practice-specific virtues and vices that facilitate or block the regular achievement of the goods internal to the practice. Entering a practice means (at least initially) accepting the authority of the standards of excellence internal to the practice, but in turn these standards themselves are not immune from criticism. All practices have histories, and the roles, products, and standards internal to practices are likewise historical and changing. It seems to me that bringing MacIntyre’s conception of a practice to bear on Saltz’s account immediately orders and clarifies the seemingly disparate elements of his artistic conception. So the product of an artistic practice would be an artifact that embodies thought through unusually extensive uses of materials, while the lack of time undermines the possibility for achieving such a product. The virtues and the vice proposed by Saltz are partially relieved of their sense of arbitrariness and vagueness through examination of their contribution to creating and sustaining the goods internal to the practice of art.

     But what is it about Saltz’s conceptions that so much as makes them intelligible and possibly attractive to contemporary people? A further contribution by MacIntyre helps illuminate this. In works since After Virtue, MacIntyre has stressed the ways in which the point and intelligibility of a practice depends upon the larger framework of the society within which the practice is institutionalized and salient. What is this larger framework for the contemporary visual arts? In his recent Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity MacIntyre notes that it is “a commonplace in some twentieth-century writing that an artist who is deeply to her or his art may in following through on that commitment may have to violate the requirements” of morality as it is conceived and entrenched in modern societies. (MacIntyre (2016), p. 141) For MacIntyre morality takes three forms in modern life. There is the ethics of the state, wherein people are understood to have certain rights and duties by virtue of being citizens of a political state; immorality consists in violating others’ rights or in failing to carry out one’s duties. Then there is the pervasive morality of the market, wherein people understand themselves as individuals possessing desires and interests, the satisfaction of which characterizes the good life, and immorality consists in blocking others from such satisfactions. Then there is Morality proper, a system of restrictions (such as ‘do not lie’, ‘do not steal’, ‘do not cheat’) whose motivation and point is obscure, and that functions to restrict desires. It is not unusual for a modern person to feel that the three systems issue conflicting demands on how to act in a particular case.

     On MacIntyre’s construction, first Oscar Wilde, and then, more searchingly, D. H. Lawrence show how an artist’s commitment to their practice might call into question morality, in one or the other or all of the modern conceptions. A character in Wilde’s An Ideal Husband says that morality “is simply the attitude that we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike”; and in a published letter Wilde himself writes that “An artist has no ethical sympathies at all. Virtue and wickedness are to him simply what the colours on his palette are to the painter.” MacIntyre comments that “Every artist is more than an artist, someone who needs to know not only what Wilde is happy to tell him, how not to live [that is, not to follow the dictates of morality], but also how to live.” (p. 142) Because Wilde refuses to submit his or any artist’s tastes and desires to any concern for consistency or any ethical conception whatsoever, MacIntyre turns to D. H. Lawrence for a more ethically strenuous conception of artistic practice than Wilde’s passive acceptance of whatever desires and tastes the artist happens to have. For Lawrence the sensations, feelings, and emotions that one happens to have are just part of the emotional defense of old, habitual ways of living. So the task of the modern artist “is to enable us to see and to feel by showing us what there is to be seen and to be felt, putting us into a new relationship to ourselves, others, to things,” (p. 147) a formulation that seems to capture also whatever crypto-ethical imperative there is behind Saltz’s scattering urgings. As Lawrence himself put it: “A new relationship between ourselves and the universe means a new morality” and “The true artist doesn’t substitute immorality for morality. On the contrary, he always substitutes a finer morality for a grosser. And as soon as you see a finer morality, the grosser becomes relatively immoral.” (Lawrence (1925), pp. 521 and 525) The problem with Lawrence’s conception, so MacIntyre argues, is that it requires that habits and emotions be educable, which in turn requires that people have a desire to be educated, and that for this desire to be rational they must further have some attractive aim or standard in terms of which they can come to count as relatively uneducated or educated. But Lawrence neglects this second-order desire to be educated and the relevant teleological framework.

     With these points from later MacIntyre, we can return to Saltz and start to understand what makes his artistic conceptions both attractive and profoundly dispiriting. Recall #4 from my summary of Saltz’s book: ‘Be yourself, but even more so, exaggerate yourself.’ Saltz’s conception of ‘being yourself’ in art-making is very much in the tradition of Lawrence: being yourself is not (perhaps in the manner of Wilde) expressing whatever sensations and desires you happen to have, but rather engaging in a kind of ceaseless search for those subjects, media, and manner of handling in which one might find part of oneself expressed. So perhaps the attractiveness of Saltz’s conceptions stems from their recycling of these deeply entrenched points articulated so vividly by Lawrence. But then why ‘exaggerate’? Saltz’s discussion of this on p. 49 is so brief and scattershot, but he seems to be suggesting that the artist ought not to express her individuality tout court, but rather that part of her individuality that is not expressed by other artists, lest one’s art look like someone else’s art. Saltz does not say why one person’s art looking like another’s (on first glance? after extended consideration?) is a decisive flaw, but the point is recognizable as a long-held dogma of modern and contemporary art, rooted in the peculiar Romantic doctrine that each individual person is unique in all aspects, then taken up into the marketing of artworks as unique commodities organized around the particular brands of individual sensibilities. What then comes to occupy the missing second-order desire and teleology in Lawrence’s scheme is of course the art market; it is not surprising then that a third of the book is devoted to why and how the new artist should enter and sustain herself with the extant art world. One might think that what makes Saltz’s current persona as ‘America’s best known art critic’ and a social media influencer so dispiriting is not just the open desperation of his desire for mediated attention, with his shenanigans and posting of images of genitalia, nor his over-heated prose style of proclaiming this or that artist a genius to whom one should kneel, and this or that other artist fraud to be scorned. No, what is most dispiriting is his profound, irremediable conformism.

References:

D. H. Lawrence, ‘Art and Morality’ (1925) in Phoenix (1936)

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981)

-----Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (2016)

Jerry Saltz, How to Be an Artist (2020)

--Seeing Out Loud (2003)

--Seeing Out Louder (2009)

Contemporary Sculpture as a Spatial Art: On Paul Crowther’s Theory of the Art Object, Part 2.2

     In my previous blog post I continued a review of Paul Crowther’s recent book Theory of the Art Object. In explicit disagreement with most fashionable views in academic writing and art criticism, Crowther argues that there are distinctive characteristics of the different major art media (painting, sculpture, drawing, etc), and that such characteristics provide resources of meaningfulness that are themselves distinctive of each medium. Following a long-standing manner of conception, Crowther distinguishes painting from sculpture as a two-dimensional art form against sculpture’s three-dimensionality. In order to account for relatively recent kinds of three-dimensional arts, Crowther further distinguishes sculpture from assemblage: whereas in a sculpture each part contributes to the formation of an aesthetic unity, in an assemblage parts maintain a sense of their distinctive existence prior to their incorporation into a work of art. Crowther then further distinguishes assemblage proper from installation art, in that part of the meaning of a work of installation is given in the relationship between the work narrowly conceived and its space of display; by contrast assemblage is as it were self-contained and indifferent to its contingent spatial location.

      In my previous post I suggested that Crowther’s conception is in two senses ahistorical: he neither considers and incorporates any material relating to the historical changes in the concept of sculpture, nor does he consider the historicity of art historical genres generally or of sculpture in particular (see the previous post for explication of these points). Perhaps Crowther’s full account suggests that recent history does enter in one way, in that the development of assemblage and installation art might be thought to have forced the expansion of the concept of sculpture. But the widespread pre-modern practice of ‘spolia’, the incorporation of recognizably prior artworks into a new work, such as the installation of 2nd-century reliefs into the early 4th-century Arch of Constantine, points to a perennial kind of assemblage; and the site-specificity of countless Paleolithic paintings and Neolithic monuments suggests an archaic and durable artistic practice of relating artifacts to site. (Crowther notes the latter point, but misses the former (p. 74))

     So one might think that something like the conceptual differentiations marked in Crowther’s schema is necessary for making sense of the world’s art generally. But does this schema illuminate our more specific concern with the novel aspects of contemporary sculpture? Crowther approaches the issue through the basic claim that each of the genres of three-dimensional art has a distinctive ‘ontology’ and manner of engaging the viewer. What makes a conception ‘ontological’ is that offers a way of comprehending “who and what we are”, and “our relation to being.” As artistic genres, the kinds of three-dimensional art “draw attention not only to how we occupy space, but also to how we share it with modes of configured material.” And as ontological, the artistic genres and their related instances “illuminate the finite limitations of organic beings, yet also offer an aesthetic compensation for it, through the order of being that they allow us to identify with in imagination.” (ibid) So for Crowther an artistic genre and its instances have the following features: (a) distinctive characteristics that can be described generally and without specifying a range of contents; (b) a consequent distinctive manner of soliciting engagement; and (c) an ontological schema that bears particular implications for a poetics of finitude, both in what it expresses of conceptions of self and relation to nature, and in its compensations, effected through the exercise of imagination, for the contingencies and limitations of finite beings. Crowther of course includes the qualification that this schema is a piece of conceptual typology, and that in practice particular works may be marginal with respect to a genre, or contain characteristics of more than one genre.

     Now for sculpture (as ontologically distinct from assemblage and installation), Crowther specifies the schema as follows: (a’) (i) a sculpture consists of material shaped into a form (p. 61); (ii) a sculpture is a marker of place, and so has ‘some relative constancy’ that permits its identification across time (p. 59). Then (b’): Sculpture, like painting, has a virtual content in addition to its material substrate; but in contrast to painting, in sculpture the material and virtual contents seem to inhabit the same space simultaneously. This co-habitation of the material and the virtual gives sculpture “the hint or evocation of magical transformation”, and so “there is always something of the miraculous in sculpture.” (p. 61) And (c’): On this point Crowther distinguishes relief sculpture from free-standing sculpture. He writes that relief sculpture “brings the virtual content towards the viewer physically even whilst creating an illusion of recession” and so “solicits touch”, (p. 63) but fails to indicate any implication this has for the poetics of finitude. Perhaps he means to include the effects of relief sculpture with those of free-standing sculpture. The latter “has a fully thing-like structure” that also “has great kinship to the body insofar as it has a dominant aspect, and has lower extremities that stay upon the ground.” Since sculpture necessarily embodies virtual content, and the content evokes the events and gestures of an embodied being, a sculpture as something relatively enduring is also ‘monumental’, in the sense that it involves “a preservation and elevation of meaning.” Since we are relatively transient and mobile beings in contrast to a relatively enduring and fixed sculpture, the contemplation of a sculpture “allows us the fantasy of finitude suspended, and does so at the level of being that is fundamental to existence, namely space-occupancy.” (ibid) Crowther’s most developed example of a traditional work of sculpture is Michelangelo’s Rome Pieta. Crowther stresses the way in which Michelangelo’s use of aspects of the physical medium, such as the marble’s color and sheen, fuses with the rendering and disposition of the bodies (Mary’s youthful melancholy; the upward facing Christ entwined with the folds of Mary’s drapery) to create not just the general sculptural effect of monumentality, but moreover shows the mutual adaptation of medium and meaning, and so enhances the sense that the meaning achieved in the work is something that is only available in sculpture, and not in life or in other art forms. (pp. 63-5) (For a much more detailed account of the work that in the end agrees with Crowther’s point that a distinctive feature that contributes to the sense of this Pieta as among the supremely powerful works of art, see Leo Steinberg’s account (2020?) More recent works—Duchamp’s Étant donnés, a late capitalist gewgaw of Jeff Koons, a low stack of bricks by Carl Andre—are treated as instances of works at the limits of sculpture, works that, despite their oddness in exhibiting lack of facture and excessive or insufficient differentiation of parts, show the unity of aesthetic appearance and co-existence of materiality and virtuality characteristic of sculpture.

     Assemblage and its variant sub-form installation are treated more briefly. In terms of Crowther’s schema and in contrast to sculpture, both exhibit (a’’) juxtaposition of independent parts, with again installation further distinguished by incorporating its context of display (p. 67).  (b’’) Because the parts are independent and pre-exist their incorporation into the work of assemblage, the kinds of meaning that arise are relatively (in contrast to sculptural meanings) allusive and ambiguous, and so solicit from the viewer more imaginative possibilities. Crowther writes that the audience “is invited to play with conditions of objectivity”.  To capture this point he introduces the difficult conception of ‘notional axes of arrangement’ through which the viewer grasps, or attempts to grasp, the unprecedented kinds of artistic unity possessed by assemblages. Although the source of his conception is unmentioned here, Crowther seems to be drawing from L. A. Rogers’s book Sculpture (which he cites approvingly elsewhere), wherein Rogers uses the term ‘axes’ more literally to identify a range of horizontal and especially vertical dynamisms and compositional forces that unify figural sculptures. (Rogers, pp.132-33) Crowther adds the term ‘notional’ to suggest that the kinds of concepts imaginatively mobilized by viewers to grasp the artistic unity of assemblages are those of ‘conditions of objectivity’, specified in an explicitly Kantian manner as unity, plurality, totality, extensive and intensive magnitude, substance and accident, and so forth (pp. 67-9). And (c’’): As with many aesthetic experiences, those induced by assemblage loosen up “our customary cognitive moorings to the objective world,” but distinctively do so “in reference to [the work’s] physical being.” Assemblage provides a “much more labile dimension” to the social, psychological, and autonomously artistic meanings than other art forms. And at a deeper, metaphysical level, the use of independent parts in a relatively contingent configuration suggests that “all finite things come together, and eventually come apart.” (p. 70)

     The schema presented in a’’-c’’ is equally applicable to assemblage and installation, but installation bears further characteristics by virtue of its context-specific incorporation of its conditions of display. As the key difference between assemblage proper and installation is the latter’s incorporation of the context of its display into its content, installation typically creates an environment, and so massively expands the possible physical trajectories of the viewer. As Crowther puts it with regard to installation: “Movement through or around the assembled elements constitute the most basic axes of arrangement. In the former case, the installation allows diverse possibilities of movement through its configured elements and envelops the viewer the viewer . . . In the second case, walking around the configuration allows its details to emerge . . . “ Crowther’s examples of such installation are works by Cornelia Parker and Anya Gallacio. The former’s Thirty Pieces of Silver (1988-89; 2011) displays flattened silver objects, such as plates, spoons, and trophies, suspended from wires in groups. The latter’s ‘Preserve “Beauty”’ (various instances 1991-2003) displays a small field of living daisies pressed between four panes of glass, so that over days and weeks the flowers pass from blooming to decaying to forming dull brown detritus on the floor. Crowther readily and convincingly analyzes such works as exhibiting characteristics a’’-c’’ and so ultimately as instances of a poetics of finitude. (pp. 71-73)

     So Crowther has provided the account of contemporary sculpture as a spatial art that was missing in the canonical formulation Rosalind Krauss’s ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’. Or so it seems. I turn in my next post to the work of an especially challenging, though far from unique, contemporary sculptor, Giuseppe Penone’s. Penone’s first major work was a series of ‘actions’ in 1968, the best known of which is ‘Maritime Alps—My height, the length of my arms, my depth in a river’ (1968). The work consists of a rectangular frame placed in a shallow stream bed. Does Crowther’s account provide the requisite conceptual materials for understanding Penone’s piece?

References:

Paul Crowther, Theory of the Art Object (2020)

Philip Fisher, Making and Effacing Art

Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October 8 (Spring 1977)

Clare Lilley et alia, Giuseppe Penone: A Tree in the Wood (2018)

L. A. Rogers, Sculpture (1969)

Leo Steinberg, Michelangelo’s Sculpture (2018)

Making Sense of Contemporary Sculpture: On Paul Crowther’s Theory of the Art Object, Part 2.1

     In my previous blog post, I began a critical consideration of the philosopher Paul Crowther’s recent book Theory of the Art Object. In this book, as in several others in the past two decades, Crowther explicitly aims to present an account of both art generally and specific art forms, such as painting, sculpture, and drawing, that is at odds with much of contemporary theorizing about the arts, both from philosophers and art historians. Crowther’s most general complaint about most contemporary theorizing about the arts is that it is reductivist, in the sense that it treats the meaning of individual works of art, art forms, and art generally as exhaustively given in their particular uses; so the meaning of an artwork might be on one account  the political use to which the work is put in a political context, or on another account the identity-affirming use to which it is put in a particular community. Crowther insists by contrast that a philosophical account of art and the arts must explicate what it is about artworks that so much as allows them to be put to these various context-specific uses. On Crowther’s account the basic feature or features of artworks qua artworks are those that give rise to the distinctive fascination that works of art possess; in turn, it is this fascination that is recruited to particular uses in different contexts (political, religious, communal, etc.) in order that the works might be attractive to their intended audiences. Crowther further claims that the elements that produce this fascination, beyond whatever particular uses they are put, bear in their artistic employment distinctive kinds of existential or metaphysical meanings, especially meanings relating to human embodiment and finitude.

     As I indicated in my first post on Crowther’s book, I’ll focus on his account of sculpture and the related spatial arts of installation and land art. A guiding question is: Does Crowther’s account offer resources for understanding and appreciating the peculiarly dynamic and extended nature of contemporary sculpture, resources that are unavailable in the canonical accounts given by Rosalind Krauss starting in the late 1970s? Crowther’s account of the place of sculpture among other spatial arts is straight-forward: He first distinguishes painting from sculpture as different kinds of spatial art, the former an art of coloring two-dimensional surfaces, the latter an art of working three-dimensional materials. He then interestingly distinguishes sculpture from assemblage: In a sculpture every part is “governed by the character of the whole” and accordingly each part’s “character is meant to be absorbed within the aesthetic effect of the whole.” (p. 57) By contrast in an assemblage the parts retain something of their existence prior to their incorporation into an artwork. The parts of an assemblage appear to be ‘found’. (ibid) A major sub-genre of assemblage art is installation art, whose distinctive aim is to “recontextualize any space where it is shown” and so the relation of the work to its context of display is internal to the meaning of the work. (p. 59) Finally, land art is something different than sculpture or installation outdoors in that it is not simply placing something within a pre-given natural setting, but in addition the artwork creates a place, which Crowther characterizes as “something that envelops the body, offering many different aspects to be comprehended in relation to the work’s overall unity.” (p. 79) I take Crowther to be getting at something like this: in an outdoor sculpture or installation the core of artistic meaningfulness arises from the viewer’s visual and kinaesthetic access to and mobile exploration of the work, even when, as in installation, the work’s setting is an element of the work. But in land art the viewer grasps herself more immediately as part of an indeterminately large setting; the viewer is herself placed, and placed in unsurveyably vast terrestrial, atmospheric, oceanic, astronomic, and cosmological settings.

     Before proceeding to test Crowther’s conceptualization against the puzzling work of one of the greatest of contemporary sculptors, Giuseppe Penone, I pause to make two comments on Crowther’s categorization:

A.  Crowther ignores the history of the concept of sculpture. The relevant history of Crowther’s conception of sculpture begins in 1766 with Laocoön, the much-discussed treatise of the playwright, theologian, and theorist of the arts Gotthold Lessing. There Lessing developed and explicated the contrast between poetry as a temporal art and painting as a spatial art. In Lessing’s work the concept of sculpture is recessive and minimally treated as an instance of spatial art, whose exemplary art form is painting. The philosopher Herder responded quickly and with characteristic vigor, initially in 1769 in the first and fourth of his Critical Forests, and then with the treatise Sculpture in 1778. Like Crowther nearly 250 years later, Herder asserts that different art forms have correlatively different effects; in a characteristically florid and hectoring passage, Herder writes that “Both [painting and sculpture] are supposed [by others] to serve a single sense and to raise a single aspect of our soul! Nothing could be falser than this! I have closely considered both art forms and have found that no single law, no observation, no effect of the one fits the other without some difference or delimitation.” (p. 42) Herder immediately proceeds to an account that bedevils the next centuries of art theorizing, wherein each art form is supposed to be correlated with a single sense: painting—sight; music—hearing; sculpture—touch. (p. 43) This correlation of sculpture with touch continues through the mid-20th century with Herbert Read’s The Art of Sculpture, where, in terms closely echoing Herder, Read claims that painting concerns ‘sight-sense’ and sculpture ‘touch-sense’.  (Read,  (1953), p. 48) Read quotes William James’s unfortunate statement that “touch-space is one world; sight space is another world. The two worlds have no essential or intrinsic congruence” (James (1892), quoted at Read p. 47), a thought that, combined with the schema that assigns each major art form to a single sense, prevents one from grasping the evident point that sculpture is also a visual art, and that both painting and sculpture can well be understood as spatial arts. So one issue for anyone else who wishes to give a philosophical account of sculpture will be to grasp the distinctiveness of the appeals to tactility in sculpture while integrating such appeals with vision, as well as the viewer’s bodily mobility. Crowther wisely simply abandons the Herder/Read one art-one sense schema, but with it the persistent intuition that artistic sculpture typically recruits aspects of the sense of touch in a relatively intense and heightened degree in comparison with other art forms. (I’ll return to this issue at the end of my review and compare Crowther’s account of sculpture with what seems to me the most illuminating contemporary account, one offered by the philosopher Robert Hopkins as developed from some resources introduced by Susanne Langer).

B. Along with ignoring the history of the concept of sculpture, Crowther ignores the historicity of the artistic genre of sculpture. What I mean is that nothing in Crowther’s account registers the fact that art forms are not obviously universal, and that art forms emerge, develop, and (perhaps) decay. To this concern Crowther might well readily reply that the evidence of the so-called ‘Lion-Man of Hohlenstein’, an ivory statuette recently re-dated to around 40,000 BCE, suggests that sculpture is as archaic and basic an art form as painting, drawing, and music. Nonetheless, to show the sort of conceptual considerations that Crowther ignores, consider a recent account of the emergence of artistic genres given by the philosophers Michel-Antoine Xhignesse. Xhignesse treats artistic genres under the conception of ‘art-kinds’. Such kinds, he argues, are sub-set of the much broader class of ‘conventions’. Out of Xhignesse’s intricate and innovative account I only select and note here his claim that art-kinds have a particular historical profile: (a) Art-kinds emerge in particular historical and social contexts as a matter of sheer contingency; there is nothing in the nature of human beings and human social and cultural life that determines that say, painting and sculpture should be considered arts and a fortiori distinctive arts. As Xhignesse writes: “It is not arbitrary, of course, that our artistic practices typically exploit features of the human sensory apparatus rather than, e.g., sense-modalities only available to star-nosed moles. But the particular forms that this exploitation takes, and the priority we assign to different ways of exploiting the same sense-modalities, are, ultimately, arbitrary and historically contingent.”  (b) Conventions, and so art-kinds, arise when some way of making ‘catches on’. A way of doing things might catch on for any number of reasons, “including their ties to the human perceptual apparatus, complementarity of function and ease of processing fluency, piggy-backing on evolutionarily-selected capacities and traits, reinforcement of or by existing practices and institutions, or for purely arbitrary factors (in which case the resulting categorization is effectively random).” (c) Once established, an art-kind becomes part of an artworld, itself a historically contingent social organization that includes other art-kinds, institutions, and a set of interlocking roles (e.g. ‘artist’, ‘curator’, ‘critic’, ‘gallerist’, and so forth). So considered synchronically, an established art-kind is a kind of social fact that includes a range of practices and exemplars, ignorance of or incompetence within disqualifies one from appreciation of the kind and its works. But considered diachronically, in terms of an art-kind’s emergence and institutionalization, all one sees is contingency; there are other kinds, equally well or poorly rooted in general aspects of human beings, other ways of organizing these kinds hierarchically, and other uses to which these kinds can be put. My point here is just that Xhignesse’s claim that, considered diachronically, art-kinds are sheerly contingent is diametrically opposed to Crowther’s insistence that art-kinds such as sculpture arise solely out of aspects of human embodiment together with certain human needs (here unmentioned) arising from human self-consciousness, yet it is hard to see how either has introduced conceptual resources and arguments that might convince the other to change his mind.

     The issues that arise from my two comments extend, so it seems to me, far beyond the discussion of contemporary sculpture, and certainly nothing in the comments provides convincing reasons to think that Crowther cannot make sense of such sculptures’ novel appearances and meanings. But the comments do I think intensify the question of whether Crowther’s account, or indeed any like it that claims to read off the character of an art form from general aspects of human embodiment and self-consciousness, can illuminate sculpture generally or contemporary sculpture in particular. My next blog post will consider in detail Crowther’s application of his account to the sculptures of Michelangelo and Jeff Koons, and then further test his account against the work of Penone.

References:

Paul Crowther, Theory of the Art Object (2020)

Johann Gottfried Herder, Critical Forests (‘First and Fourth Grove’) (1769)

-----Sculpture (1778)

Robert Hopkins, ‘Sculpture and Space’ in Imagination, Philosophy and the Arts (2003), ed. Matthew Kieran and Dominic Lopes

-----‘Sculpture’ in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (2003) ed. Jerrold Levinson

William James, Psychology (1892)

Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form (1953)

Gotthold Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Poetry and Painting (1766)

Herbert Read, The Art of Sculpture (1956)

Michel-Antoine Xhignesse, ‘What makes a Kind an Art-kind?’, British Journal of Aesthetics (2020)

On Paul Crowther’s Theory of the Art Object (2020)—Part One

     There are perhaps only a very few pieces of theoretical or philosophical writing in the past half century that have achieved the status of obligatory points of orientation in thinking about contemporary art. On almost anyone’s list of such writings would be the art historian Rosalind Krauss’s ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’. First published in the journal October in 1979, it has since been anthologized (Foster 1983), been the subject of a conference with published proceedings that ponder its impact on two generations of scholars and its peculiar resonance (Papapetros and Rose (2014)), and subjected to critical reflection at length (Meltzer 2013). One puzzle for future intellectual historians, if indeed there are any, will be to understand the attraction and influence of such a confused and profoundly opaque piece of writing. Krauss’s brief essay argues, or at least presents, three broad claims: 1. Modernist sculpture is characterized by a kind of ‘sitelessness’, in the sense that instances of it characteristically lack pedestals and, more generally, lack any reference to the context in which they are placed. Put positively, modernist sculptures explore “a kind of idealist space” (the essay offers no explanation of this kind of space). Paradigms of such modernist sculpture are the major works of Brancusi (Krauss, p. 34).  2. There is a complete break between Modernist and Postmodern sculpture. The modernist exploration of ‘idealist space’ was artistically exhausted by around 1950, and by the early 1960s sculptures could in no sense be rightly understood as developments out of earlier sculpture (pp. 34-5). To attempt to understand the later sculptures as developments is an instance of  ‘historicism’, an intellectually disastrous style of thought wherein we attempt to comfort ourselves by diminishing any sense of novelty in history and “reducing anything foreign in either time or space, to what we already know and are.” (p. 31)

     Krauss proceeds to her central claim: 3. Postmodernist sculpture, having entered “a categorical no-man’s-land” (p. 35), now exists in an ‘expanded field’ (p.36), wherein sculpture is, or at least can be, initially categorized as ‘not-landscape’ and ‘not-architecture’ (p. 35). This categorization turns out to be only part of a larger scheme that includes the further categories of ‘landscape’ and ‘architecture’. All these categories can then be placed in a diagram, that (properly interpreted) shows that sculpture is only one of four artistic possibilities in postmodernist spatial arts (please bear with me for a few more sentences): there are also ‘marked sites’ (works that are simultaneously landscape and not-landscape, such as Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty); ‘axiomatic structures’ (works that are simultaneously architecture and not-architecture, such as Bruce Nauman’s video corridors); and ‘site-constructions’ (works that are simultaneously landscape and architecture, such as Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed, or the works of Michael Heizer and Mary Miss). Krauss arranges all eight of these categories (architecture and landscape and their negations, and the four artistic possibilities) in a formidable diagram called a Klein group, complete with dotted lines and arrows. The alleged beneficial effect of this novel set of categorizations is that one gains the ‘permission’ to ‘think’ these other forms (marked sites etc.) together with and as opposed to sculpture.

     Alas, Krauss provides no clues as to what one should think when one ‘thinks’ sculpture and these other forms (that perhaps will be another problem for future intellectual historians). One problem that immediately arises is that Krauss provides no positive characterization of postmodernist sculpture. Such sculpture, according to Krauss, is exhaustively characterized as the conjunction of ‘not-architecture’ and ‘not-landscape’. But a second’s reflection indicates that there are a non-finite number of things that are not-architecture and not-landscape, for example Napoleon, the Big Bang, and the contents of my stomach. And if postmodernist sculpture exists in a categorical no-man’s land, how do we know that it’s sculpture, as opposed to, say, painting or cooking? Krauss overlooks the point that all of the four (artistic) categorizations are precisely categorizations of spatial arts, and that some conceptually prior sense of what a spatial art is guides the very selection of the four categorizations as relevant to the understanding of contemporary art.

     The philosopher Paul Crowther’s most recent book in the philosophy of contemporary art is the most recent of his many books in the philosophy of art of the past thirty-five years that dispute accounts like Krauss’s on every point, and that attempt to develop an alternative account. The charge that Crowther has repeatedly brought against Krauss’s account of contemporary art, as well as the accounts of other prominent art historians, including Hal Foster and Yve-Alain Bois, is two-fold. First, these accounts treat artistic meaning as exhaustively characterized by the role that the relevant key terms play in a system of differences. So ‘sculpture’ is ‘not-landscape’ and ‘not-architecture’, but this leaves wholly mysterious what features sculpture actually has; and a fortiori such accounts ignore the ways in which constitutive features of sculpture are recruited into the meaning of actual works of sculpture. Second, Krauss and others treat the meaning of artworks as wholly determined by the context of reception or use of the work. So the meaning of a political work of art is exhaustively given in its actual political uses, or a feminist work is meaningful, and only meaningful, in the ways it contributes or fails to contribute to feminist concerns. Against these mainstream academic accounts, Crowther has argued that different art forms—painting, sculpture, drawing, etc.—do have positive characteristics, and that in a vast array of instances these characteristics play constitutive roles in the artistic meaning of works. Further, these characteristics are a source of what Crowther calls the intrinsic fascination of the artworks, and it is the appeal of such fascination that so much as makes it possible for artworks to play further roles, such as in politics.

     Theory of the Art Object reprises arguments and analyses that Crowther has given elsewhere across a range of art forms, including painting, photography, architecture, and digital art. On two central points this book seems to me to provide advances on, or at least alternatives to, his previous works, and I will accordingly focus on these. Crowther’s general argument, markedly phenomenological here and elsewhere, might be summarized as follows (with specific reference to spatial arts): Human beings are embodied, and a distinctive feature of their embodiment is their ‘spatiality’, their always existing within some determinate space. Human beings have capacities for movement within space, and these capacities are practically coordinated with their capacities for perception and imagination. The activity of perception is awareness of what is present, and the activity of imagination is awareness of what is absent—the past, the future, alternative perspectives, and hypotheticals. Human beings also have capacities for making, and one of the signal exercises of this capacity is in the making of works of art. Among human artworks are those of the visual arts, a sub-class of which are the spatial arts, pre-eminently sculpture, but also architecture, as well as recent art forms such as installation and land art.

     Now, one might find this argument unexceptionable, even truistic, while nonetheless noting that little of its conceptual content and claims is so much as registered in contemporary art theorizing such as Krauss’s. But where Crowther’s points take on particular interest is in his explication of what is involved in vision, and so in visual art. Vision is privileged among the senses in two ways: it allows the perceiver to grasp the spatial relationships among parts of an object; and it allows the perceiver to grasp the spatial relationships among many objects within a perceptual field. (pp. 10-11) As a vehicle of heightened and thematized visual perception, the visual arts will inherit and exploit these basic features of visual ordering. So relations of part-to-part, part-to-whole, and whole-among-wholes will always be at issue in the visual arts. This thought motivates Crowther’s most general claim that the distinctive media of works of art carry distinctive potentials for meaning. Since human beings are inescapably embodied and finite, their making and perception of artworks also inescapably bear meaning, associations, and resonance.

    Can Crowther’s account fill the lacuna in Krauss’s and contemporary art theorizing’s understanding of sculpture? That is to say, can it capture the distinctive features of contemporary sculpture qua sculpture, and not as the categorical no-man’s land marked by ‘not-architecture’ and ‘not-landscape’? My next blog post with interrogate Crowther’s account of sculpture, with specific reference to the challenging contemporary work of the Italian sculptor Giuseppe Penone.

References:

Paul Crowther, Theory of the Art Object (2020)

Hal Foster, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture (1983)

Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October 8 (Spring 1977)

Eve Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn (2013)

Spyros Papapetros and Julian Rose (eds),  Retracing the Expanded Field: Encounters between Art and Architecture (2014)

On Raymond Geuss’s Not Thinking like a Liberal (2022)

     In 2019, on the occasion of Jürgen Habermas’s 90th birthday, the philosopher Raymond Geuss published a short essay offering a highly critical evaluation of central features of Habermas’s thought. Geuss remarked that a “soft nostalgic breeze of late liberalism wafts through the writings of Habermas.” A central feature of Habermas’s writings, according to Geuss, is the claim that contemporary social institutions seemingly lack legitimacy, and that the appropriate philosophical response to this lack is to develop a justification of political institutions out of conceptual resources provided by a theory of communication. This theory in turn centered on the claim that everyday communication presupposes and so commits everyday agents to a kind of normative demand, namely that the agents come to an agreement through free and undistorted further communication. Geuss, asserts that Habermas’s theory has an obvious ‘natural affinity’ to motifs in traditional liberalism, in particular in its high valuation of free discussion, with the corollaries that free discussion is always possible and indeed always a good thing. Geuss counters that these corollary claims are empirically false, and counter-poises to Habermas’s theory of communication the assertion from Habermas’s teacher Theodor Adorno that the claim that any and every thought is universally communicable is a pathological ‘liberal fiction’. More substantively, Geuss advances John Dewey’s naturalistic theory of communication, whereby communication is always context-specific and inherently limited, and clarification in human life arises more typically from action than from unlimited discussion. Dewey’s theory of communication was part of his self-described ‘experimentalism’, and the radical experimental stance, so Geuss asserts, had little chance for a hearing in post-War Germany, as opposed to Habermas’s account, which comfortably fit in with the political project of the integration of the German Federal Republic into the West.

     There was a swift reaction to Geuss’s essay from academics prominent in the reception and propagation of Habermas’s theory, in particular the political philosopher Seyla Benhabib and the historian of ideas and social commentator Martin Jay. Both Benhabib and Jay dispute Geuss’s characterization of Habermas’s thought, and suggest that part of Geuss’s error stems from his neglect of Habermas’s writings of the past 35 years. A striking feature of their responses is their vehement and personalized character: one or the other or both accuse Geuss of misanthropy, tastelessness in publishing something highly critical on such an occasion, and anti-liberalism, even to the extent of playing into the hands of Vladmir Putin (!). Nothing is said of Geuss’s previous writings critical of liberalism, while his critics claim that he mis-represents his own attitude towards Habermas in his celebrated first book, The Idea of a Critical Theory. I don’t find the narrowly construed cognitive dimension of Benhabib’s and Jay’s remarks worth discussing—neither bothers to address, for example, Geuss’s presentation of Dewey’s account of communication as an alternative to Habermas’s; Jay’s response in particular is like the scatter-shot maledictions of an enraged innocent who simply cannot tolerate talk of that sort of thing in fine company--, but the quickness of the vehement responses suggests that Geuss had touched a nerve. Which nerve?

     Geuss’s new book Not Thinking like a Liberal suggests an answer. The book is an autobiographical account of Geuss’s education, first in a Catholic boarding school in Pennsylvania, then at Columbia University including a year as a research student at Freiburg im Breisgau. Herein Geuss attempts to show that his unusual and highly particular course of education predestined him, as he puts it, “to not be on good terms with liberalism,” (p. 15) and so at least partially to stand outside of what he calls “the real total ideology of our time, the conjunction of democracy, liberalism, and capitalism,” an ideology that even in some of its more sophisticated forms “presents itself as the anti-ideology par excellence.” (p. xiv) Geuss evidently views Habermas, along with the political philosopher John Rawls, as the most prominent instances of liberal political philosophers who claim to tinker with bits of the internal mechanisms of this total ideology while accepting the basic structure; so it is perhaps unsurprising that their equally comfortable acolytes like Benhabib and Jay are on high alert for any sign of dissent. While insisting on the Nietzschean claim that historical phenomena have no essences and so no formal definitions, Geuss treats liberalism as a cluster of attitudes and beliefs embedded within modern and contemporary institutions and practices. The most prominent central attitudes are toleration of differing tastes and beliefs and approval of discussion oriented towards making decisions to which all participants can be seen as consenting. These attitudes seem to flourish in the neighborhood of a kind of economic arrangement often characterized as the ‘free’ market. At the core of this, Geuss claims, is a peculiar fantasy of ‘the sovereign individual’, something offered under various conceptions in the philosophies of John Locke, Adam Smith, and J. S. Mill. The sovereign individual has free will and is capable of free consent. He is self-transparent in the sense of knowing the contents of his own mind, and knowing his own wants, desires, and interests. He lives surrounded by a private domain of intimacy; others may only legitimately enter his domain by invitation. The sovereign individual nonetheless shares the world with other sovereign individuals, and their appropriate political framework is one that is neutral towards their differing beliefs and tastes. This neutral framework is accordingly one to which each sovereign individual can and should give their consent. (pp. 23-5)

     The central figure in Geuss’s education was a Hungarian priest named Béla Krigler, the teacher of religion at Geuss’s boarding school. Krigler had studied philosophy in Hungary after World War II, and was additionally keenly interested in psychoanalysis. He was a member of the Order of the Pious Schools, a rival to the Jesuits, and accordingly he was opposed to the Thomism of the Jesuits and favored rather aspects of the thought of St. Augustine. After the failed Hungarian revolution in 1956 he was imprisoned by the Communist authorities and then emigrated ultimately to the United States. Geuss rejected Krigler’s Catholicism, but Krigler’s views and arguments directed against Thomism, Protestantism, and liberalism permanently marked Geuss’s outlook. In this book and elsewhere Geuss frequently quotes Adorno’s remark that ‘the piece of grit in your eye is the best magnifying glass’, and avers that his “peculiar Catholic education was such a piece of grit.” (p. 42) Abstracted from their religious context, Krigler’s arguments undermined the core aspects of doctrinal liberalism in attacking the fantasy of the sovereign individual as false and unsustainable. No human being is ‘independent’, but rather always lives in relations with others (and for the Catholic, with God as well). Human beings are not self-transparent, but rather obscure to themselves and at best capable of a highly partial and perspectival self-awareness and self-understanding. The liberal fantasy of the sovereign individual cannot recognize the existence of irreducibly social goods, that is, goods that are not simply the aggregate of sovereign individuals’ goods. Discussion does not necessarily lead to greater understanding nor a fortiori to unanimity, nor does it constitute an ideally free-standing realm, for in a great many areas discussion is at most incomplete and only consummated in  experience and action. And the idea of a neutral framework presupposes the illegitimate reduction of transcendent claims and identity-constituting commitments to mere beliefs and tastes.

     Further aspects of Geuss’s Catholic education, though mostly independent of the critique of liberalism, contributed massively to his mature views and settled intellectual inclinations. Students learned Latin and at least one other language, and Krigler and other teachers emphasized the impossibility of single term-to-single term translation for concepts given in terms like logos, agape, or auctoritas. (p. 53) Translating such terms always involves elaborate explanations that considered the terms’ history, presuppositions, range of meanings, and varied contexts of use. Readers of Geuss will recognize the fruits of this education in his masterful genealogical accounts of the concepts of the state, liberalism, democracy, and rights in his second major book History and Illusion in Politics, or in his appreciation of Marx’s and Engel’s remark that the only science (Wissenschaft) they know is the science of history, or in his numerous essays on Nietzsche on philology and genealogy. The headmaster of the school, Father Senje, delivered the Sunday sermons, and seized the occasion to lecture on the lives and poetry of the poets Paul Verlaine and François Villon, and conveyed the sense not just of the greatness of their poetry, but of the peculiar amoral attractiveness of their lives. Senje’s sermons emphasized “the inherent complexity of human life, the difficulty of judgment, the unsurveyability of choices, and the obscurity of eventual outcomes.” (p. 74) These sermons combined with Krigler’s explicit teachings on the variety of holy lives of the Saints to show that liberalism had no monopoly on the appreciation of the plurality of worthwhile human lives.

     The second half of the book treats Geuss’s education in college through his mid-20s, and mostly provides reinforces a secular version of Krigler’s and Senje’s teachings with more intellectually elaborated arguments and examples. The undergraduate teaching and writing of Robert Paul Wolff and the writing of Geuss’s dissertation adviser Robert Denoon Cumming showed the internal incoherence and fruitlessness of central doctrines of liberalism, especially in the wafflings and self-undermining qualifications of John Stuart Mill. The coruscating brilliance of Sidney Morgenbesser provided a charismatic exemplum of a life lived without concerned for liberalism. Geuss’s discovery of and subsequent attachment to the writings of the poet Paul Celan and Theodor Adorno inoculated Geuss against the appeal to clarity; again, readers will recognize the fruits of this in many of his essays including ‘Celan’s Meridian’ and ‘Vix intelligitur’. Geuss ends the book with a reflection upon an aphorism from René Char’s Hypnos, ‘Don’t dawdle in the ruts of results’ (‘Ne t’attarde pas à l’orniére des resultats’), a poetic version of the teaching also in Adorno to permit oneself criticism without attempting in advance to provide some positive alternative to what one criticizes. One acts, or ought to act, not in hopes of some result, but because of the kind of person one is. Criticism is among other things a kind of action.

     What is life like for those of us who have never been tempted by liberalism in Geuss’s sense: the conception of the free, self-transparent self; the idea of unfettered discussion leading to unanimity; the ever-vigilant policing of borders between inviolable intimacy and free markets; the evisceration of identity-constituting commitments and orientations into beliefs, preferences, and tastes?  Given that liberalism is part of the real, total ideology of the present, for Geuss “there was no way completely to escape participation in interlocking and mutually reinforcing social institutions that were structured so as to embody “liberal” conceptions.” So Geuss and anyone like him “must be constantly bi-ocular and bi-lingual,” (p. 163) in the sense that while one maintains something of the alternative orientation, one nonetheless falls back in everyday conversation into talk of such liberal conceptions as rights, just as the atheist might say that “If that happens, then God help us all.” This final realization, too, comes to fruition in Geuss’s other writings, especially in his book Changing the Subject with the account of Augustine’s doctrine that we are bi-ocular in living simultaneously in the city of man and the city of God, two cities offering incommensurable understandings of human life, desire, belief, and the good, wherein the imaginative construction of the Divine city provides an alternative framework for criticism of the secular one.

     Geuss’s education was, as he repeatedly insists, highly peculiar, and only possible for a brief period where something of a bubble of non-liberal and non-authoritarian Hungarian Catholicism briefly survived in an isolated institution in the United States. In one sense, the most that the book demonstrates is that such an education was possible, because it happened. No arguments are presented, other than the fascinating summaries of Krigler’s considerations. I do not imagine that the points Geuss advances against liberalism here will sway liberal critics like Benhabib or Jay. One finds a considered, but hardly more temperate, version of such liberal criticism of Geuss’s outlook in the philosopher Charles Larmore’s book What is Political Philosophy? Larmore quotes an early version of Geuss’s criticisms: “The multiple forms of life that liberalism recognizes are always assumed to be embedded in an overriding consensus that has latent moral significance.” Larmore asserts a standard counter to this: “Nothing could be more wrong that to suppose that the liberal vision of society is one essentially of moral consensus. That would be to miss the problem to which consensus is the intended solution [to the problem of persistent disagreement on religious and ethical questions] as well as to misunderstand the nature of the consensus in question . . . The basic principles on which liberalism seeks agreement are not, moreover, principles people are presumed to share already, but rather principles it holds that there is reason for them to accept.” (Larmore (p. 13 and note)) Following Krigler, Geuss would urge that the conjuring trick has already occurred in Larmore’s so much as thinking that the basis for political philosophy is reflection upon what unspecified people would or wouldn’t have reason to accept. And like Benhabib and Jay, Larmore descends into abuse in referring to Geuss’s alternative conception to liberalism advanced as a kind of ‘neo-Leninism’ in his book Philosophy and Real Politics is “silly if not irresponsible,” while adding his disdain for Geuss’s and Adorno’s refusal to give the ‘normative grounds’ of their criticism. (Larmore (p. 73n)). The non-liberal can only note that what counts as serious, and what counts as silly and irresponsible, is itself a political question embedded in particular contexts and frameworks.

References:

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (1951)

Seyla Benhabib, ‘Jürgen Habermas’s 90th birthday’, medium.com@arendt_center

Paul Celan, ‘The Meridian’ (1960)

René Char, Hypnos (Feuillets d’Hypnos (1947))

Robert Denoon Cumming, Human Nature and History: A Study in the Development of Liberal Thought (1969)

John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty (1929)

-----Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938)

Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory (1981)

-----History and Illusion in Politics (2001)

-----Philosophy and Real Politics (2008)

-----‘Celan’s Meridian’ in Politics and the Imagination (2010)

-----‘Vix intelligitur’ in World Without Why (2014)

-----‘Augustine’ in Changing the Subject (2017)

-----‘A Republic of Discussion’ (2019), The Point

-----‘The last nineteenth-century German philosopher: Habermas at 90’ (2019), Verso blog

-----Not Thinking like a Liberal (2022)

Martin Jay, ‘”The Liberal Idea Has Become Obsolete”: Putin, Geuss and Habermas’ (2019), thepointmag.com

----‘Geuss, Habermas, and the Rose of Unreason’ (2019), medium.com@arendt_center

Charles Larmore, What is Political Philosophy? (2020)

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1846)

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971)

Robert Paul Wolff, The Poverty of Liberalism (1968)

-----In Defense of Anarchism (1970)

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)