Benjamin Buchloh on Gerhard Richter, Part Three and Conclusion: A Mystery Unsolved

     In my earlier posts on Benjamin Buchloh’s massive book on the painter Gerhard Richter, I have considered first Buchloh’s style and the difficulties it presents for understanding, if not intelligibility; then Buchloh’s general account of Richter’s painting, with some consideration of Buchloh’s novel account of Richter’s early, pre-canonical works in East Germany, as well as Richter’s inaugural mature work Tisch (Table); followed by a summary of Buchloh’s account of Richter’s abstract paintings, wherein Buchloh sees the same principles and concerns embodied that he had identified as central to Richter’s oeuvre as a whole. I turn now to a brief consideration of Buchloh’s interpretation of October 18, 1977, not unusually viewed Richter’s masterwork, followed by an assessment of Buchloh’s account as a whole, along with a suggestion of an alternative interpretation.

     October 18, 1977 is a series of 15 paintings of photographs of the so-called Baader-Meinhof gang and of scenes associated with the deaths of their central members Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, and Andreas Baader, and others in prison. Richter painted the series in 1988, and it was rapidly recognized as a major contribution to contemporary art. Uniquely from among his many series, Richter insisted that the works be kept together and exhibited as a whole. Buchloh briefly discusses the series in the book’s introduction, where he characterizes its “haunting referential precision” and “ascetic gray scale.” (p. xviii) He asserts without explication that “the images of traumatic destruction sustain a residual element of mnemonic redemption by the mere fact of their existence as paintings,” (ibid), and that the images “operate as an omen of the persistence of historical tragedy and collective trauma” (p. xix).

     After this characteristically opaque series of unexplicated assertions, Buchloh then devotes a short chapter to the series two-thirds of the way through the book. He opens the discussion of the series by remarking that it “immediately confronts its viewers with the question of whether, and how, history can actually be represented in contemporary painting.” (p. 359) In this instance the confrontation is especially challenging, because the series allegedly violates “two prohibitions simultaneously: first, against representing historical subjects in modern painting, and second, the specific prohibition against remembering this particular episode of recent German history” (ibid). Because of this latter alleged prohibition (reiterated at pp. 380-1), the sheer painting of the photographs and their public presentation “construct(s) a pictorial representation of the mnemonic process itself” (p. 373). And not only does the making of the work violate a contemporaneous ban on reflection, their presentation as a whole series ‘contests’ “the current modes of consumption as the exclusive form of responding to artistic practice.” (p. 381)

    Buchloh’s central point, if I understand it, in considering the series is that it should be seen as of a piece with Richter’s abstractions, and indeed all of his main work, in presenting a reflection upon and response to the alleged contemporaneous situation of painting. One cannot help but note that he does not consider any particular painting. Further, his claim that in the mid-late 1980s there was a prohibition (in West Germany?) on discussing the activities and suspicious deaths of the members of the Baader-Meinhof group is belied not just by the fact of the contemporaneous publication of various relevant books, but also by the production of a major film, Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn), with segments by the major artists Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlöndorff, and others, in 1978, only one year after the deaths in prison of the three central figures. Buchloh’s (feigned?) ignorance of this is bizarre, if not inexplicable (except as a buttress to his false claim that Richter’s series violated some (unstated) prohibition.

     Perhaps Buchloh might respond that, despite the film and the publication of various books, there remained a kind of resistance to reflection that gave the series a particular frisson of challenge and taboo-breaking. If so, Buchloh’s account might then be seen not so much as error-ridden, but only incomplete, in that he neither attempts to explain whether and why the series retains its power to unsettle, nor attempts to give an account of any particular painting. And again he could reply that those latter tasks were not his. But what, then, is he attempting in this book?

     The plain message of the book is that Gerhard Richter has, in all of his major series and in the realized conception which is his oeuvre as a whole, responded to the central demands of the advanced artistic painting after World War II with a unique seriousness, clarity, and rigor, that his intentions and ideas are fully realized in his work, and that Richter’s oeuvre is uniquely successful among the major artists of the past half century. I don’t imagine that I’m the only reader of the book who finds Buchloh’s various accounts poorly argued and obscure to the occasional point of unintelligibility; but I may well be the only one who will then attempt to say where Buchloh has gone wrong. The questions that I posed to Buchloh’s various accounts in my earlier posts adumbrate much of what I would wish to say by way of criticism. So to those questions, I add the following two remarks:

     A. Everywhere Buchloh’s account exhibits a curious mixture of the arbitrary and the pseudo-rigorous. The arbitrariness afflicts his stipulation of the three, and only three, demands placed upon serious art in the post-WWII period. Likewise when he claims that some aspect of Richter’s work fulfills one or more of those demands. For example, he claims that Richter’s October series is, in its very presentation of the paintings of those particular images, an act, or at least the representation of an act, of remembering (“a pictorial representation of the mnemonic process itself”). But why is this so? Would any painting of them be accordingly so? Is nothing further required to induce such a process? Couldn’t the very evidence that Buchloh cites support the opposite view, that Richter’s incapacity to remember and mourn is evidenced by his inability to elaborate upon the images and inability to incorporate them into broader concerns and kinds of meaningfulness? And then once Buchloh has stipulated his various conditions and demands upon artistic seriousness, he seems to think that such demands are both uniquely and exhaustively met by Richter. Is there no partial meeting? Are no other concerns relevant? The seeming rigor of Richter’s work, as interpreted by Buchloh, could be with equal justice be characterized as a kind of imaginative and artistic impoverishment.

     B. One of major aspects of Richter’s work after all is the fact that he makes artistic paintings. Why? Buchloh has nothing to say about this, except that early on Richter decided to paint and to keep painting. Again, why? Buchloh’s inability to so much as recognize this as a question, and furthermore to treat it as anything more than issuing in a demand to strip artistic painting of utopian aspirations comes out spectacularly in one of Buchloh’s own interviews with Richter. At one point in a lengthy interview in 1986 Richter states his basic diagnosis of recent artistic painting: “a specific quality that we have lost . . . all that perfection of execution, composition and so forth . . . I see the basic fact as the loss of the Centre.” Buchloh responds:  “In [Hans] Sedlmayr’s sense? You can’t be serious?” Richter replies: “Yes, I am; what he was saying was absolutely right. He just drew the wrong conclusions. He wanted to reconstruct the Center that had been lost . . . I’ve no desire to reconstruct it.” (Richter (2009), pp. 175-76) Buchloh can make nothing then, and makes nothing in the recent book, of Richter’s unambiguous endorsement of Sedlmayr’s diagnosis in the book Art in Crisis (Verlust der Mitte (literally ‘Loss of the Center’) in the original German). In that largely forgotten book the conservative art historian Sedlmayr that modern art was characterized by a number of phenomena: the establishment of ‘pure’ spheres in art (purism, isolation) wherein artists sought to give their works only the characteristics of the very art kind and medium in which they worked; a progressive driving asunder of opposites, whereby works seemed to be either, say, wholly material or wholly conceptual; a tendency to be attracted by lower rather than higher, and so a progressive hankering after the inorganic that shows up in an increasingly intensive and pervasive anti-humanism, also exemplified by a tendency to give an inferior status to human beings; and a detachment from the solid earth, especially in the ‘placelessness’ of sculpture; a tendency to be attracted by the lower rather than the higher, that is, a sense of de-sublimation (Summarized at Sedlmayr (1958), p. 147) Most of the book is devoted to elaborating these diagnostic points. Towards the end Sedlmayr suggests that nonetheless there is a “permanently valid standard by which we must measure the art of our own day” (p. 216), a standard that is somehow to be derived from permanent features of human nature. Following recognition of these features, modern artists are faced with the task of “making the undisturbed supernatural order visible in images of the disturbed natural order” (p. 223), and thereby creating a “revived sacred art,” (p. 247) the making and presentation of which will allegedly create a ‘new center’ for culture. No one could be surprised that Richter rejects Sedlmayr’s proposal for reconstruction, but Sedlmayr’s diagnosis of modern art is hardly idiosyncratic, and broadly and loosely consistent with points urged by figures like Ortega Y Gasset, Theodor Adorno, and Clement Greenberg. My limited point here is just that Buchloh fails to recognize and so has nothing to say about the elements of this diagnosis, and that his insistent that the only serious historical task for a post-WWII painter is secularizing painting and ridding it of earlier, failed utopian aspirations is both idiosyncratic and lacking any explicit endorsement from Richter.

     C. Is Buchloh’s interpretation then simply wrong and indeed unhinged from any major elements of Richter’s practice and oeuvre? Not at all. Earlier I noted as a seeming feature of Buchloh’s account the peculiar pairing of arbitrariness and pseudo-rigor. One might think that such features also characterize major aspects of Richter’s practice. Why, after all, does Richter insist in theory and practice that Tisch (Table) is his foundational work, and that all of his subsequent work is bound by the kinds of diagnoses and demands it embodies? Why does he insist on the strict separation of the figurative paintings of photographs and the abstract works? Why do none of his series exhibit as it were some forward movement, some sense of progression or learning by doing? It is for Richter very much as if the painterly conceptions governing particular series and his oeuvre as a whole are derived prior to the actions and processes of painting itself, and the resultant works are various instances of a type that exhibits no further ordering or meaningfulness. It seems to me that this feature accounts for much of what so many people sense as the ‘coldness’ in Richter’s work. One might think of it as quasi-Kantian, in something like the sense of Kant’s moral philosophy, where some command derived from Reason is used to judge all empirical phenomena. Everything is brought before the court of reason, which operates strictly and mercilessly. As with Buchloh’s account, Richter too seems in his conceptions bizarrely rigid and inflexible, while then treating the deliverances of his conceptions as final and so subject to no further reflection or elaboration. Nothing is learned instance to instance within a series, and nothing is learned from one series to the next. Richter has nailed himself to his Tisch. So perhaps the sense that Buchloh is onto something with regard to Richter’s oeuvre stems from his sentimental correspondence with Richter’s works, and not his understanding of them.

     In a concluding future post, I shall consider the recent literature on Richter as a whole and offer an evaluation of its virtues and limitations in understanding Richter’s puzzling oeuvre.

References:

Benjamin Buchloh, Gerhard Richter: Painting after the Subject of History (2022)

Gerhard Richter, Writings 1961-2007  (2009)

Hans Sedlmayr, Art in Crisis: The Lost Center (1958)

A Left Response to the Woke?—Part One: Short Review of Susan Neiman’s Left is Not Woke

     In the past few years, and with increasing intensity, ‘woke-ness’ as a political ideology, as a cultural style, and as a kind of life-style expression has been increasingly targeted by the resurgent nationalist right-wing of American politics. Even aside from the general point that historical phenomena have no essence, the central characteristics collected under the term ‘woke’-- with its plasticity, rapid evolution, and surrounding heated polemics—are by no means clear. A media profile of a ‘woke’ person would probably include participation in Black Lives Matter protests, strong verbal support for whatever currently counts as an instance of ‘social justice’, and an extreme fastidiousness about uses of personal pronouns. For the nationalist right-wing, ‘woke-ness’ is the latest instance of a liberal attempt to undermine and destroy the United States and the practices, institutions, and values that at some time or the other in the past made it uniquely great. On the other hand, no less an authority than the recent U. S. President Donald Trump, who claims to know the best words and to possess a certified genius-level intelligence, has recently declared that no one knows what the word ‘woke’ means.

     In the late Spring of 2023 several new books have from a left perspective have also subjected ‘woke-ness’ and its ideologies to sustained criticism. Here and in two future blog posts I’ll offer summaries and critical reflections upon these books, Susan Neiman’s Left is Not Woke, Norman Finkelstein’s I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It, and Walter Benn Michaels’s and Adolph Reed Jr.’s No Politics But Class Politics. First, Neiman’s book:

      Susan Neiman is a public philosopher based in Berlin. Her major strictly academic work is a study of the various conceptions of reason in the work of Immanuel Kant, and of what unity these conceptions might have across their uses in epistemology, moral philosophy, aesthetics, and the philosophy of history. Her other books, including this most recent one, are philosophical works that aim to address an audience outside of the academic study of philosophy on issues in historical self-understanding, morality, and education. This new, quite short book bears the signs of political urgency in its passionate address to contemporary ideologies, and evidence of an undeniable haste in its writing, if not in its conception: Neiman says that it was based upon a lecture delivered in April of 2022 at the University of Cambridge; she refers to a conversation she had while finishing it in October, and I read the published edition in the latter half of May 2023. Its peculiar title, ‘Left is Not Woke’, does not give ready access to the book’s contents, as she only characterizes ‘Woke’ briefly, and uses and mentions several times ‘Left’ only in passing while suggesting that the concept is of little substantive interest. Rather, she polemicizes on two central points: negatively, that much seemingly ‘progressive’ (or ‘leftist’) recent thought is self-undermining, in that it acts upon theoretical conceptions stemming from anti-Enlightenment thought that are irredeemably anti-progressive, that is, conservative and pessimistic; positively, that the theoretical conceptions needed for a ‘progressive’ politics are found in the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, especially Rousseau and Kant (in his essays of the 1780s and 90s).

     Neiman begins with an assertion: there are three “philosophical ideas that are central to any left-wing standpoint: a commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress.” (p. 2) She then offers brief characterizations of her critical target, first as ‘Woke’, then as identity politics. Woke is an attitude expressive of a small set of emotions and affective capacities, one that “begins with concern for marginalized persons,” then “emphasizes the ways in which particular groups have been denied justice, and seeks to rectify and repair the damage.” Rage at injustice towards marginalized groups induces the desire for immediate action. However, Woke as actualized undermines itself in neglecting or rejecting the three left commitments: Instead of starting from a universalist concern for the full range of human nature, its dignity, and its violations, it “ends by reducing each [person] to the prism of her marginalization.” It undermines its own concern for justice by de facto replacing such concern with issues of power inequality. And in attempting historical reflection and reparation Woke “often concludes that all history is criminal” (pp. 5-6), thereby losing qualitative distinctions and differentiations, and thereby losing sight of any conception of moral progress.  Identity politics is seemingly the concrete expression of the Woke attitude, yet it “is interest-group politics” that “aims to change the distribution of benefits, not the rules under which distribution takes place” (p. 21, quoting Todd Gitlin). So on Neiman’s account Woke is a kind of left attitude so degenerate that it passes over into a pseudo-leftist identity politics, affirming tribalism in a manner also adopted by conservatives. (p. 20)

     Why do seeming leftists become Woke? Neiman claims that the source of the degeneration is good emotions corrupted by bad theory. The leftist emotions are “empathy for the marginalized, indignation at the plight of the oppressed, determination that historical wrongs should be righted.” (pp. 5-6) [Note: it is characteristic of the very loose and surely very rapid writing here that, of the three cited ‘emotions’ (empathy, indignation, determination), only the second is in fact an emotion.] However, these ‘emotions’ are currently experienced in an atmosphere of ‘theory’, a range of anti-Enlightenment assumptions that are “now embedded in the culture, for they’re usually expressed as self-evident truths.” (p. 6)

     Neiman initially identifies the prominent academic obscurantists Judith Butler and Homi Bhabha as purveyors of ‘theory’ (ibid.); but she urges that because ‘theory’ is so deeply embedded currently, to challenge it one must turn to its roots in anti-Enlightenment thought. Her chief target, and one who she discusses repeatedly, is the historian and social philosopher Michel Foucault. Her criticisms of Foucault chiefly consists in repeatedly noting that he never declared what sort of criteria governed his historical critiques. Additionally, she registers his explicit statement that ‘power is everywhere’ (p. 63) and that he suggested (without affirming) that power is “simply a form of warlike domination.” (Foucault quoted on p. 64) Finally, his writings, in particular Discipline and Punish, secrete the sense the ‘progress’ in civilization is no such thing, but rather the replacement of one system of power relations by another. So in his lack of criteria Foucault expresses the loss of universalism, in his historical analyses the collapse of the distinction between justice and power, and in his style, tone, and targets the refusal to recognize progress as such. Foucault’s great prestige among recent academics then, we are asked to think, is a major proximal source of the bad theory generating Woke attitudes.

     Neiman’s conception of reason as a counter to Woke is given in a few pages (pp. 67-70), together with claim that the conception is distinctive of Enlightenment thought.  A major use of reason is to question established authorities. Reason, as Kant put it in his essay on Enlightenment, requires for its exercise a kind of courage in thinking for oneself. In order to think for oneself, and not just to follow established authorities, one needs ideas that have an evaluative dimension and that cannot plausibly be seen as simply reflections of and prima facie legitimations of established authorities, practices, and institutions. Such ideas are ideals, and “[r]eason’s most important function is to uphold the force of ideals.” (p. 68) So reason is really a demand for legitimation, as expressed in the question “Does this practice or institution or manner of living meet our ideals?” For something to so much as be a candidate for a legitimizing response to this question, the response must cite reasons, and not just say ‘that’s the way it has been and is’. Finally, reason motivates action, in that if the response to the question shows a human phenomenon to be incapable of legitimation, one as a rational reason to act to change the situation in the direction of meeting the relevant ideal. So reason, and Enlightenment thought generally, can be seen as the source of the core characteristic ideas of the left: the possible application reason generally to human phenomenon, and the relevant evaluative criteria expressed in terms of general human possibility, are part of its universalism; the use of ideals marks the conceptual gap between de facto power relations and just situations; and its efficacy in motivating action oriented towards bettering situations shows its belief in the possibility of progress. Later, again echoing themes from Kant’s late thought, Neiman suggests that it is a distinctive activity of reason to provide orientation for critical thinking (p. 102) and ground the possibility and intelligibility of hope (p. 107).

     Does Neiman’s diagnosis of the anti-Enlightenment roots of Woke hit the mark? Is her counter-appeal to reason plausible? These questions are not easy to answer, in part because of Neiman’s style of urgency. She gives only the briefest of characterizations of leftism and progressivism; she identifies herself as a socialist but says nothing of what is distinctive of socialism, nor offers a single sentence of reflection on its historical failures (on this see Dunn (1984) and (1992); a fortiori she says nothing about the relation (Identity? Overlapping concerns? Common concerns and conceptions with some tension among them?) between socialism on the one hand, and leftism, progressivism, or for that matter anarchism. Her stipulative characterization of the three commitments central to leftism would be rejected out of hand by many leftists; among countless examples, the analytic Marxist John Roemer characterizes socialists as committed to equality of opportunity for self-realization, political influence, and social status (see Roemer (1994), p. 11). A similar vagueness or indeterminacy attaches to her very brief characterization of Woke, with only its concern for personal pronouns cited as an instance of its concrete activity (p. 140)

     Aside from the not insignificant issue of indeterminacy of its key concepts, it seems to me that the most basic problem with Neiman’s approach attaches to her quasi-Kantian conception of reason in its critical employment. For Neiman the use of reason is historically situated, but nothing of that situation marks its characteristic activities and conceptions. ‘Reason’ produces ideals, which are then used as criteria to judge the legitimacy of historical phenomena. Reason is like a judge with a schedule as long as human existence and cases extending throughout every phenomenon in human culture. Reason in 2023 is no different from reason in 1793; reason now has nothing to learn from the Romantic critique of the Enlightenment, nothing to learn from Marx or Nietzsche, nothing to learn from the historical failures of socialism. There is only ever and ever more judging. Along with a failure to engage with the specifics of Woke, Neiman misses (so it seems to me) the point that Kantian reason does not exhaust the orientations, motivations, and exercises of critical thinking. A kind of Romantic, and even Kantian, way of putting the point would be to note that Neiman does not so mention the imagination as something that would be exercised in constructing counter-images to the present.

     One might also think that Woke too lacks imagination. Neiman suggests that Woke’s lack of the distinction between justice and power impoverishes its sense of what might be changed, and can only satisfy itself enforcing pronoun usages. But it seems to me that the point is better put in the manner of Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed, who note that identity politics seems in imagination to hold the entire world, its practices, institutions, and hierarchies fixed, and only to want to re-arrange the ways in which the various slots in the infernal prison are filled. The leftist appeal is not to reason’s criteria, but to Rosa Luxemburg’s imaginative project of counter-posing socialism and barbarism.

     Next (in 3-4 weeks) I turn to Norman Finkelstein’s book, which in great contrast to Neiman’s offers detailed critical accounts of the thought and activities of leading figures of Woke ideologies.

 References:

John Dunn, The Politics of Socialism: An Essay in Political Theory (1984)

-----Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future (2nd edition (1992))

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1977)

Todd Gitlin, Letters to a Young Activist (2012)

Immanuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’’ (1784)

-----‘What is Orientation in Thinking?’ (1786)

-----‘On the Old Cliché: That May be Right in Theory but it Won’t Work in Practice’ (1793)

Susan Neiman, Left Is Not Woke (2023)

John E. Roemer, A Future for Socialism (1994)

On Benjamin Buchloh's Gerhard Richter (2022), Part 2: Richter’s Abstraction

     I turn now to Benjamin Buchloh’s account of Gerhard Richter’s abstract paintings. Richter’s best-known type of abstractions are his ‘squeegee’ paintings, so called because they are evidently made by dragging a rigid element across a very large canvas upon which numerous and various pigments have been deposited. Many of the works seem to be the product of multiple episodes of depositing and squeegeeing, and some bear the additional marks from vertical smearing by hand and scraping with a pointed implement. A second type consists of works Richter made, starting in 1966, of squares or rectangles of solid colors arranged in a grid; the best known of these are his ‘color charts’ from the early 1970s. Along with these two types, Buchloh also discusses other relatively recent and lesser known types, including some dense works on glass where the paint seems poured and puddled, some works consisting of complex drawn and painted marks largely covered and obscured by an over-painting of white, and some digital prints of a great many variously colored narrow horizontal stripes. And of course when Richter paints these abstract works during the past sixty years, he also paints a great many works in his other major category, figurative works that appear as paintings from photographs, typically wherein the elements are very slightly blurred.

     The abstractions present a number of challenges to understanding. Besides the general question as to why Richter maintains, while keeping separate, his two great kinds of paintings of photographs and abstractions, there is the question of how to so much as to begin looking at these works. One might well think that for much of the world’s painting one begins to understand and appreciate an artist’s oeuvre anywhere one likes or happens to find oneself; the process of artistic looking, though it has no terminus, begins with immersive attention to some particular work. But in Richter’s work the presumptive unit of appreciation seems rather to be the series; the works do not typically reward attention as particulars, but rather as members of a group, where different instances show how some conception and associated procedures result in this, but also this other and that. Secondly, as noted by Buchloh, Richter works as if to block the sense that one series arises from reflection upon a previous series’s achievements, failures, and unrealized potentials. It is as if there is no ‘development’ in Richter’s work, no working out of some ruling passion, obsessive motif, or responsiveness to intra- and extra-artistic changes, nothing, that is, of what one usually finds providing a kind of unity to an artistic oeuvre, but only a kind of quasi-timeless instantiation of different possibilities. How can one make sense of this?

     As with his more general account of Richter’s oeuvre, Buchloh begins from the stipulation that a fully serious artistic oeuvre that emerges c. 1960 must in some way acknowledge and embody responses to three demands: that the oeuvre recognize the (alleged) historical failure of the utopian dimension of early twentieth-century avant-gardist art movements; that the oeuvre ‘work through’ this failure while expressing an appropriate attitude of mourning; and that the oeuvre acknowledge and ‘negate’ its contemporaneous conditions of ‘spectatorship’, specifically those formed by the predominance of industrialized imagery (in advertisements and popular arts) of the post-WW II world. Richter’s alleged response to the first demand is most prominent in Buchloh’s account, wherein he repeatedly claims that Richter’s abstraction represents a ‘secularization’ of prior avant-gardism.

    Buchloh states his central claims in some exceptionally difficult and obscure pages (most centrally at pp. 163-69); here is my best attempt at a summary: Richter accomplishes this secularization through various artistic strategies of ‘effacement’ (also ‘withdrawing’, ‘withholding’, ‘erasure’, ‘negation’, and ‘concealment’), whereby the artist invokes some prior manner of artistic achievement and then does something expressive of dis-identification with or rejection of that achievement; further, something suggestive of that achievement is subjected to handling that aims to attack, dismantle, or undermine that achievement. This description of course is evidently appropriate for Richter’s manner in the inaugural work of his oeuvre, Tisch (the painting of a table partially obscured by large scumblings). This artistic strategy of effacement is seen in perhaps its most general form with ‘withdrawal’, especially the artist’s withholding of some figure, some expression, and/or some ‘statement’ where such might be conventionally expected. Richter’s combines three prior models of withdrawal: Kazimir Malevich’s, where abstraction is in the service of transcendence of this world; John Cage’s, where artistic silence (on Buchloh’s bizarre, if not preposterous, account) is expressive of ‘sublime indifference’ to the world (p. 159); Theodor Adorno’s, where the refusal to depict utopia helps maintain the active memory of utopian aspirations in the face of their contemporary degradation or extinction. Buchloh asserts that Richter’s fusion of these three philosophico-artistic models “makes up . . . the paradoxical foundations of Richter’s nonrepresentational paintings.” (p. 165)

    At one point Buchloh claims that in Richter’s abstractions the impulse to withdraw fuses with “the opposite impulse—to suspend abstraction itself in extreme ambiguity” (p. 169). But it seems to me that in much of the text Buchloh treats something like ‘extreme ambiguity’ as an effect, and not a coeval impulse, of the various strategies of withdrawal. For the most part he refers to the characteristic artistic effect of these strategies of withdrawal as ‘undecidability’; elsewhere Buchloh writes of “the unfathomably contradictory nature of [Richter’s] abstractions” (p. 42) and “the inextricably aporetic structures of [Richter’s] work” (p. 177).  On yet another alternative formulation he writes that in the abstractions “we encounter the dialectics of chance and control”. (p. 492) This ambiguous/undecidable/contradictory/aporetic result of the ‘dialectics of chance and control’ is instantiated variously in the different sub-types and series. So in the squeegee paintings the ‘control’ is given in the conceptually and inferentially transparent simple (though determinedly inexpressive) gesture of dragging the implement across the large plane of the canvas, while the dimension of chance (which Buchloh usually refers to as ‘the aleatory’) is given in seemingly non-finite and non-ordered micro-detail of layers and striations of paint. Analogously, in the color charts the ‘control’ is given in the equally saturated monochrome patches and their arrangement in grids, while the arrangement appears random. Buchloh repeatedly praises every aspect of these abstractions as the product of a unique insight on Richter’s part, one that was ‘historically necessary’ (p. 552) as a response to the three demands Buchloh places upon serious art.

     So on Buchloh’s account Richter’s abstractions are explained in the same manner as the artistic oeuvre as a whole. The second and third demands (that is, of mourning and of ‘negation’ of the contemporary conditions of spectatorship) are dealt with more briefly, with the same sort of assertions discussed in my previous post. As with the oeuvre, so with the abstractions: Richter acknowledges and responds to the three demands, themselves arising from insight into the artistic and historical developments of the twentieth-century. Buchloh judges Richter, with his rigor and radicality, to be uniquely successful in meeting the demands. Has Buchloh solved the mystery of Richter?

     Again, I postpone a critical consideration of Buchloh’s account until my final blog post on the book, and so will raise for the moment a single question: Does the account so much as offer a recognizable picture of an artistic oeuvre? One way, by no means decisive, of seeing what might be problematic is to recall remarks on the typical character of artistic thinking and artistic creativity. In his book Patterns of Intention the art historian Michael Baxandall compares and contrasts the ways in which describe and explain on the one hand an historical artifact, the Forth Bridge in Scotland built at the end of the nineteenth-century, and on the other Picasso’s cubist Portrait of Kahnweiler. Baxandall argues that the focus of our attempt to explain such artifacts is their ‘intentional visual interest’, which consists roughly in how and why they look the way their makers look precisely as they in fact look. The attempt at explaining intentional visual interest itself presupposes that one adopts the ‘idiographic stance’, wherefrom one is primarily to explain how some particular artifact addresses some problem or set of problems. Baxandall notes that with regard to the bridge, a great many of the problems and relevant concerns are set prior to the creative process of designing the bridge; there are the environmental conditions, the need to bear such-and-such loads, to be long-lasting, etc. There are also aesthetic concerns, some more imposed, such as the sort of appearances that people will take as appropriate to a secure bridge, some relatively freely chosen by the designer, which might include selecting from, combining, or innovating with regard to existing bridge aesthetics. Baxandall then notices that much of this applies similarly to explaining Picasso’s painting, but also with significant differences. With regard to the bridge, the questions ‘Why a bridge?’ and ‘How to make this bridge?’ are conceptually distinct: the need for a bridge arises, and then there are different proposals for particular bridges to satisfy the need. But with regard to the painting, Baxandall suggests that the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ are not so sharply distinct; both ‘saturate’ the realm of artistic thinking. One implication of this is that the artistic painter’s understanding of her situation is much more personal than the bridge-designer’s, as aspects of the painter’s style, concerns, manners of handling and composition interpenetrate with her sense of why she is doing the particular thing she does. One way of indicating where Buchloh may have gone wrong is in noting that with his account Richter’s practice, with its originary insight into a seemingly fixed-for-all artistic and historical situation looks more like the designer’s practice than the artist’s.

     Approaching the issue of artistic creativity from a different angle, but with a result that overlaps Baxandall’s points, the philosopher and social theorist Jon Elster in his book Ulysses Unbound has investigated the question of why and with what implications human beings constrain themselves with precommitments, such as promises (‘I shall always do X and never Y), but also follow certain conventions (‘I shall drive on the right and not on the left’) and preferences (‘I shall avoid situations where I’m inclined to drink alcohol’). Elster treats the arts at some length, and suggests that one can understand artistic conventions and styles as instances of precommitments (for example: ‘I shall limit my improvised solo to 32 bars’). Elster’s general point is that precommitments provide artistic constraints without which artistic creativity would lack form, communicability, and intelligibility. On this account artistic creation is conceptually “a two-step process: choice of constraints followed by choice within constraints.” Then he immediately notes that the “interplay and back-and-forth between these two choices is a central feature of artistic creation, in the sense that choices made within the constraints may induce the artist to go back and revise the constraints themselves.” (Elster, p. 176) While Elster’s point about artistic creation as a two-step process harmonizes with Buchloh’s account, one notices that Buchloh, as with Baxandall’s point about the interplay between the ‘why’ and the ‘how’, has no way of accommodating the claim of the interplay of the two steps in artistic creation. By great contrast, Buchloh, like Richter himself, insists upon fixed and unalterable character of Richter’s originary insight as embodied in Tisch.

     These critical concerns in part arise from the presumption of the idiographic stance in description and explanation of the arts. To see whether Buchloh can in fact make sense of artistic works as particulars, I turn next to his most sustained and expansive account of a single series by Richter, the canonical October 18, 1977.

References:

Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention (1985)

Benjamin Buchloh, Gerhard Richter: Painting after the Subject of History (2022)

Jon Elster, Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitment, and Constraints (2000)

On Benjamin Buchloh’s Gerhard Richter (2022), Part One: If You Can’t Join ‘Em, Negate ‘Em:

I now turn to consideration of what might plausibly considered the central account of Gerhard Richter’s painting, that of the German art historian Benjamin Buchloh. As mentioned in Part Zero, Buchloh’s relationship with Richter and his work is unique in the history of art. Buchloh has been writing about Richter’s work for over forty years, and has additionally published a number of interviews with Richter over several decades. Buchloh treats Richter with the utmost seriousness, and views him as uniquely responsive to the social and artistic demands on advanced European painting after World War II. In a manner reminiscent of the art theoretician Thierry de Duve’s treatment of the work of Marcel Duchamp as an inexhaustible resource for reflecting on the nature of art in the twentieth-century, Buchloh seems to find every aspect of Richter’s work to be endlessly interesting, as if every work, every series, every decision, and every procedure reveals something fundamental about the kinds of achievement possible in recent artistic painting. A commentary on Buchloh’s many previous papers and interviews, along with the twenty chapters in this 650-page book, threatens to be a more-than-lifetime project. Here I’ll restrict myself to what I take to be Buchloh’s central points on the most discussed aspects of Richter’s work. In this first post I’ll sketch Buchloh’s general account of the demands upon artistic painting from the late 1950s on, and then consider Buchloh’s lengthy accounts of the formation of Richter’s practice circa 1960. Subsequent posts will consider Buchloh’s account of Richter’s abstractions, and of the series October 18, 1977, consisting of paintings of photographs relating to the so-called Baader-Meinhof gang. Finally, I’ll compare Buchloh’s account with those of the other recent books I’ve reviewed, and offer some reflections that I hope to be, if nothing else, sufficiently novel to merit reading.

     A. The Situation of Art c.1960:

Buchloh treats Richter as responsive to a set of strenuous demands that are placed upon advanced artists in the period after World War II. He seems to assume that responsiveness to these demands is a major part of what so much as makes an artist’s work worthy of consideration at the highest level. On this conception, Richter’s most prominent artistic peers are artists whose work embodies some sense of a response to these demands, which for the purposes of this book are Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Jean Dubuffet, Lucio Fontana, Jean Fautrier, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol. He sees three kinds of demands upon these artists:

1. All these artists are successors to the avant-garde artistic projects of the first half of the twentieth-century. Accordingly, one demand upon them is to reflect upon those earlier projects and their outcomes, which Buchloh at least thinks were unqualified failures. Seemingly crucial for Buchloh those earlier projects were ‘utopian’, although there is very little in the book to indicate what Buchloh understands by that term. He speaks of ‘utopian promises betrayed’: “some had been corrupted by design, others had succumbed to spectacularization” (p. xxii), which seems to suggest that part of these promises were a promise of spontaneity and individual and collective participation in something—In art? In politics? In life? Buchloh doesn’t say, but elsewhere he also notes without explication “the spiritualist and mystical visions of Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich, or the radial sociopolitical visions of Piet Mondrian” (p. 16), suggesting that these visions were ‘utopian’ and were shown over the decades of the twentieth-century to have come to nothing. In any case Buchloh repeatedly asserts that it is a condition of advanced art in the post-World War II to rid itself of any trace of these utopian ‘promises’ or ‘visions’.

2. Having recognized the failure of the early avant-gardists’ utopian promises, the post-War artists must adopt an appropriate complex attitude towards that failure, that of ‘mourning’. Buchloh’s terminology on this point seems to echo Sigmund Freud’s essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, as he also says specifically with regard to Richter that the attitude and associated action is ‘the melancholic staging of tradition’ (p. xxv) The key thought for Buchloh seems to be that the artist must not act as if the avant-gardist past and its failure is simply a thing of the past to be forgotten, but rather the artist must in some way embody in her work the acknowledgement of that past and work their way through it.

3. Finally, an advanced artist c. 1960 must acknowledge the contemporaneous conditions and character of ‘spectatorship’. By 1960 the advanced artist lives in  “spectacle culture” and “a totalitarian administrative order”. (ibid) Further, there is only one appropriate kind of relation to this reigning cultural order: the artist must ‘negate’ it in her work. Although the word ‘negate’ occurs many times in the book, Buchloh nowhere says what he means by the term; what Buchloh means by it emerges, as shall be seen, in his descriptions of Richter’s practice. One way in which Richter ‘negates’ the reigning order is by doing something very different. So if the contemporaneous culture routinely uses colored depictions, Richter will instead use black-and-white. The other major manner of ‘negating’ something is through po-faced parody: if the culture treats some phenomenon, say the possession of an automobile, as part of a joyous life, one ‘negates’ this false image by presenting the image of the car in as determinedly downbeat or at least expressionless manner possible. Since in the visual arts ‘negation’ cannot be a linguistic act, what will count as ‘negating’ some phenomenon is presenting that phenomenon as tainted and/or offering a productive alternative.

    Such, then, are according to Buchloh the demands upon advanced art c. 1960: to renounce recent, prominent illusions and failed ideologies associated with the arts; to acknowledge and work through these failures in one’s work and therein to exhibit the appropriate attitude of mourning; and to respond critically (through ‘negation’) to the central, novel cultural, social, and/or political conditions of one’s society. For Buchloh Richter is outstanding even among his peers in continuing and sustaining the practice of artistic painting in ways that are relevantly similar to pre-existing practices. By contrast, some advanced artists like Rauschenberg and Warhol will invent new artistic media and techniques; others like Pollock and Newman will practice the traditional artistic medium of painting, but with novel kinds of materials and techniques. Richter will instead maintain contact with the artistic tradition of representational painting in his renderings of photographs, and of avant-gardist painting with his abstracts. Buchloh suggests that Richter, more than any of his peers, “truly became the painter of the “dialectic of enlightenment”” in the sense proposed by Adorno and Horkheimer in the late 1940s in their book of that name. Again Buchloh fails to give any explication whatsoever of what that phrase meant, and contents himself with noting that the book “had in fact had a tremendously formative philosophical influence on the artist and had focused the thought of subsequent generations.” (p. xxv)

     B. The Two Foundations of Richter’s Art:

Like every writer on the painter, Buchloh follows Richter himself in treating the painting Tisch (1962) as the inaugural work of Richter’s mature artistic practice, and devotes the second chapter of the book to it. But Buchloh uniquely thinks that an earlier, little-known series from 1957, Elbe, provides key insights into the formation of Richter’s practice and that Tisch itself represents a continuation of artistic ideologies and methods already at work in the earlier series:

1. Elbe is a series of 31 ink drawings on paper, most of which (on the visual evidence of the examples printed in the book) seem to show a kind of late-modernist version of the sublime landscapes of beach, ocean, and/or sky familiar from early German Romanticism, in particular many works by Caspar David Friedrich. In most of the instances the paper is largely covered with ink; in the first three members of the series one or two small figures, again evocative of Friedrich’s manner, can be made out. One printed instance (p. 29) shows by contrast a largely beige and unstained ground, unpeopled but with splotches of ink uncertainly suggestive of conifers. Buchloh treats the series as an instance of ‘deskilling’, wherein an artist assumes a kind of normative background of a certain level of mutually conditioning skills and expressive aims, and then intentionally violates the relevant norms in offering relatively unskilled and/or relatively inexpressive marks, compositional strategies, and evaluative criteria of achievement. As ‘deskilled’, Elbe meets Buchloh’s three stipulated demands upon advanced art: (i) The series assumes a kind of continuity with avant-gardist and modernist near-abstractions while relieving Richter’s work of the utopian promises of the earlier work. Further, the restriction to black ink is evocative of the traditional use of grisaille, which Buchloh claims repeatedly (though without evidence) is characteristic of a European tradition of mourning pictures. (ii) In its semi-mechanical handling of ink, the series represents a kind of disenchantment of the earlier personal expressiveness of modernist paint-handling, and so works through the failure of the earlier utopian painterly aspirations.  (iii) In its use of small pages and in its semi-abstraction, it embodies a rejection of the prevailing contemporaneous artistic ideologies of Socialist Realism and broad public address through murals that marked Realist works. In its non-expressiveness and rejection of prevailing artistic ideologies, Elbe announces some of the foundational features of Richter’s artistic practice.

2. As described in my previous posts on the recent scholarly literature on Richter, Tisch shows an undistinguished table with curved scumblings partially obscuring the figure. And again, Tisch is treated, first by Richter then by all commentators, as the inaugural instance of Richter’s mature artistic practice. Buchloh’s distinctive interpretation (if I understand it; the discussion is exceptionally difficult and digressive, with much of the relevant chapter ranging over discussions of twentieth-century German history and brief accounts of contemporaneous works by a number of other artists) seems to be that Tisch is best understood as a kind of ‘memory image’ (p. 88), one produced with a high degree of calculation at a cultural moment of ‘memory crisis’ (p. 86), the crisis of the inability of Germans to work through their own horrific recent national past. Buchloh claims to follow Siegfried Krakauer in thinking that what makes a memory image is not just its depiction of or reference to something, but also some sense of what is excluded from that reference. Richter’s painting, then, is a memory image in the sense that, along with the table, it presents something of the forces that shape the image of the table. How so?

    Buchloh’s starts by noting that Richter expressed great interest in Robert Rauschenberg’s Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno (1963). What Richter took from Rauschenberg was the artistic practice of photomontage. Buchloh laments the choice of Rauschenberg, though not the choice of the practice, for on Buchloh’s account the practice permits the confrontation of traditional painterly concerns with photography; alas, Buchloh sighs, with Rauschenberg as with all other practitioners of photomontage except John Heartfield, the iconographic reference of the photographs included in the work is lost in favor of the heightened awareness of the artistic manipulation and juxtaposition of images. In preserving some sense of the referent, Richter presents (so Buchloh seems to argue) something that is typically excluded in photomontage as an artistic practice. It is accordingly straightforward to see how Tisch qua memory image meets Buchloh’s three demands: it de-mystifies the practices of painterly representation and abstraction (Demand #1); it provides the materials for working through the recent history of artistic painting (Demand #2); at it responds and ‘negates’ (in the sense of providing a relevant alternative) to standard contemporaneous artistic manners (Demand #3).

     As with my reviews of other recent works on Richter, I postpone an evaluation of Buchloh’s account until I have considered its full range, including in particular his account of Richter’s abstraction and Richter’s major series on the so-called Baader-Meinhof group. Provisionally I’ll make only three general remarks:

1.Buchloh’s account is afflicted with a range of cognitive vices wholly typical (in my estimation) of academic writing on contemporary art. For example, terms that play a large role in the explanation of the art are never defined or explicated; instead the author seems to assume that the terms carry some univocal meaning that is widely understood and accepted. Here the most prominent such term is of course ‘negation’ or ‘to negate’. Additionally, no rich descriptions are offered of the works discussed; no alternative accounts are considered; and the author offers no sense of what might count as a counter-example to his account. 2. Likewise, Buchloh offers not so much as a single sentence in justification of his particular conception of the demands upon contemporary art c. 1960. If an alternative account or some artist outside of the major ones Buchloh proposes is so much as mentioned, they are simply dismissed as phenomena characteristic of the malign social structures and phenomena—late-capitalism, technocratic industrialization, spectacularization—which are on Buchloh’s view rightly targeted and ‘critiqued’ by the major artists. 3. An especially peculiar feature of Buchloh’s account is his restriction to a kind of ‘great man’ view of recent artistic history, wherein a very small number of major artists single-handedly battle the nefarious forces of capitalism. Buchloh evinces no interest whatsoever in popular arts or in arts outside of the North Atlantic elite artworld. This is particularly odd in light of Buchloh’s seemingly neo-Marxist account (although very much in line with Adorno’s interests).

     In my next post I’ll consider Buchloh’s account of Richter’s abstraction and the ways in which it allegedly meets the three great demands upon the art of Richter’s time.

References:

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947)

Benjamin Buchloh, Gerhard Richter: Painting after the Subject of History (2022)

Thierry de Duve, Kant After Duchamp (1996)

-----Aesthetics at Large: Volume One: Art, Ethics, Politics (2018)

Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917)

John Rapko, ‘Review of de Duve’s Aesthetics at Large at https://www.academia.edu/49515950/De_Duve_Critical_Review

On Benjamin Buchloh’s Gerhard Richter: Painting after the Subject of History, Part Zero: Prolegomenon on Bad Writing

     When I first thought of having a blog, I imagined it would contain writings across a range of topics and fields, including criticism of the visual arts, criticism of the performative arts, books reviews, and philosophical musings. At one point I realized that I nursed a desire for a section on bad things: bad books and bad art. In writing art criticism I had found it impossible to write a ‘scathing’ review, because I had little to say about a bad show. So I imagined short pieces, laced with wicked witticisms of the ‘Wagner is the Puccini of music’ sort, comprising a self-therapeutic lexicon of artistic invective. In a review of the 1993 Whitney Biennial, the philosopher Arthur Danto had called for a ‘Baedeker of Badness’, a guide to what shows one should spend effort in avoiding. So the project had a non-personal justification in, if nothing else, answering Danto’s call.

     Once I started writing for this blog, I quickly abandoned the project of a Baedeker of Badness. I made a couple of brief attempts to write for it, when I came across some outstandingly preposterous writings from a Bay Area pseudo-art critic and a local pseudo-artist, but I discovered that writings of such badness are as if not writings at all: they dissolve into a deserved nothingness under a few seconds of scrutiny. I did manage for publication a review of an outstandingly awful book on contemporary art, Glenn Adamson’s and Julia Bryan-Wilson’s Art in the Making; but I felt unclean for days afterward.

      I recount the fate of the Baedeker in relation to my upcoming review of a significant work in the literature on the painter Gerhard Richter, the new book by Benjamin Buchloh. Anyone familiar with the literature on Richter knows that Buchloh is widely viewed as the single most influential writing on that painter, with Buchloh having written many essays on Richter from the early 1970s through the present. Additionally, there are a number of published interviews of Richter by Buchloh that are among Richter’s most illuminating. So no serious attempt to understand Richter’s puzzling oeuvre can avoid considering Buchloh’s accounts of it, and the recent massive book is surely the summation Buchloh’s half-century of thinking about Richter.

     But there’s the problem of the writing. I decided to say something about Buchloh’s style in advance, so that I can ignore it in my summaries and analyses of the book. The style is godawful, of a kind familiar to readers of contemporary art history, a brew of academic tics, unrelieved prolixity, obscure statements that seem like they might be claims, and locutions that leave the reader wondering whether Buchloh and his editors (if there were any) have full command of standard English.

It would try any reader’s patience to the utmost for me to so much as cite, much less analyze and criticize, Buchloh’s prose. Let one example stand for many: Buchloh’s use of the phrase ‘if not’. Most of us are blessed with some familiarity of Bob Dylan’s song ‘If Not For You’, wherein ‘if not for you’ readily conveys the sense of a counter-factual, of how the world would be diminished without the existence and presence of the addressee. But what does Buchloh mean with his continual use of ‘if not’? Here are 11 (ELEVEN) instances from just the first two chapters of Buchloh’s book:

1. “all aspects [of painting] now had to voice the profound skepticism, if not the decisive disillusionment, that at the moment of the formation of a society of spectacle and control, any claim for a transformative participatory agency would at best be a parody and at worst be a blatant lie.” (p. 24)

2. Rothko and Reinhardt: ‘seemingly parthenogenetic planes or veils of color’. –“their chromatic projects would now have to be embedded all the deeper within transcendental, if not outright mystical registers.” (p. 34)

3. “Since the mid- to late 1950s in Wes Germany, the renewed permeation of the social fabric by photographic imagery . . . had promised the subject access to historical memory as much as it would increasingly record, if not actively contribute to, the erasure of the subject’s political and social agency.” (p. 36)

4. The painting’s “almost ostentatious declaration, if not its performative enactment, of those private and public epistemological breaks addresses the collectively ruling forces of historical disavowal in post-World War II Germany” (p. 46)

5.  “We would argue that the semiotic performance of acts of memory, i.e. actually working through a given system of repressive representations, seems to be at least as crucial, if not more integral, to the elaboration of mnemonic experience as its iconographic representation.” (p. 59)

6.  “While it [Richter’s painting Tisch] is by now generally recognized as one of the key works of German if not European reconstruction culture . . . “ (p. 67)

7.  “the painting engages in an infinitely more complex and subtle set of operations: an initiation, a rehearsal, and an ultimate transformation, if not a travesty, of all of the blinding discoveries that the young Richter had made at Documenta II in 1959” (p. 68)

8.  “To encounter these decontextualized citations of monochrome painting, abstract automatist gestures, and photomontage aesthetics, and to try to integrate them, would have caused major collisions, if not a chasm, of painterly identity in any young artist at that time.” (p. 71)

9.  “Warhol’s anomic despair, if not cynicism” (p. 78)

10. “Second, and equally if not more complex and important, is the question . . .” (p. 82)

11. “what is generated by the semiosis of an aleatory accumulation of randomly chosen images is an overall effect of iconic dissolution, if not effacement” (ibid)

One approaches the analysis of such prose with trepidation. Buchloh seems to use the phrase like this: ‘X if not Y’, where (a) X is asserted and Y is not; (b) Y is on the extreme end of spectrum, with X close to but not identical with Y; (c) Although X is not at the end of the spectrum, it is still pretty darned extreme. Yet if this analysis is right, then one wonders: Why bother with ‘if not Y’? Why not just state X? I cannot come up with an answer to this question that seems fitting for someone with Buchloh’s intelligence.

     There are other academic tics in this prose, including one that infests inter alia Judith Butler’s writing, where the author says that they ‘would argue X’ (see Buchloh #5 above for an instance). One retorts: Well, are you going to argue for X or not?? Here the phrase ‘would argue’ seems to mean in practice ‘assert without evidence’. Having disburdened myself and warned the reader, I proceed with the review proper of Buchloh’s important book, first with a consideration of his account of Richter’s initial formulation of his practice of artistic painting.

References:

Benjamin Buchloh, Gerhard Richter: Painting after the Subject of History (2022)

Arthur Danto, ‘The 1993 Whitney Biennial’ in Embodied Meanings: Critical Essays & Aesthetic Meditations (1994)

Bob Dylan, ‘If Not For You’ (1970)

John Rapko, Review of Art in the Making (2016) by Glenn Adamson and Julia Bryan-Wilson at https://www.academia.edu/31585034/Review_Glenn_Adamson_and_Julia_Bryan_Wilson_Art_in_the_Making_2016_

On Planer’s and Sterelny’s From Signal to Symbol: The Evolution of Language (2021)—a summary and appreciative remarks

     I first taught Paleolithic art in 2005, and continued teaching it almost every semester until I quite teaching in 2020. By 2010 I had cobbled together out of recent books on the origins of the arts and human cultures generally a serviceable background story for the emergence of visual art. Following Michael Tomasello (2001), I began with some reflection on the communicative abilities of great apes, and treated humans as distinctive in their capacities for pointing, shared attention, group projects, and especially the capacity to teach skills outside of the immediate context of their application; the teaching of skills across generations creates what Tomasello called the ‘ratcheting effect’ where humans could in effect treat a certain level and complexity of technology as given and use it as a basis for further innovations . Adapting Merlin Donald (1993) and Steven Mithen (2007) I considered the evolved capacities for art-making to be those most saliently displayed initially in pantomime and a sort of pre-linguistic, non-segmented group humming, and then in the story-telling in full language with its segmented vocabulary, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics. For what characterizes art in its distinctiveness I drew especially from Barry Allen (2008), with a sideways nod to Arthur Danto (1981), for the sense that artistic artifacts are (i) artifacts that are about something, that (ii) they embody (whatever that might mean) their being about something, and (iii) that part of their aboutness is ‘second-order’, in the sense that such reference includes reference to themselves and/or artistic practice and traditions and/or the makers or addressees of the works. Such a background was meant to help explain initially the possibility and nature of the so-called ‘Blombos pebble’, a roughly 80,000 year-old rectangular piece of ochre with one side incised with a bounded mesh of cross-hatchings. The final piece of the explanatory framework is the postulated emergence of the capacity to draw, paint, and sculpt figures, a capacity that effloresces suddenly in southwestern Europe a little over forty thousand years ago (with its contemporaneous emergence discovered in the past decade in Sarawak).

     Although there have been further discoveries and considerably more thinking about these points since 2010, something at least roughly like that framework still seems to me plausible and viable. One of the outstanding more recent contributions to this framework was Kim Sterelny’s celebrated book of 2012 The Evolved Apprentice, which argued that a key feature of the transmission of social learning to which Tomasello had drawn attention was the development of apprenticeships, wherein learners could work near masters of techniques of tool-making, hunting, and foraging, thereby acquiring such skills in a secure manner that they could in turn pass on to future learners, and additionally regularly pass on any of their refinements or innovations in those techniques. More recently still Sterelny has joined with the young philosopher Ronald J. Planer to develop Sterelny’s account of social learning in the evolution of human beings into an account of the origin and evolution of human language. Although they discuss the arts are only very briefly, it seems to me that their account suggests potentially important further contributions to our understanding of the origins of the arts, especially music and the visual arts. In what follows I summarize their central argument and then, with an eye to its contribution to understanding the origin of the arts, speculate on ways in which it improves upon some other prominent accounts.

     P & S begin with a statement of methodological criteria. An account of the emergence and evolution of human language should start with a plausible description of the communicative capacities of our last common ancestor with the great apes, a description derived from our understanding of the current social formations and communications of chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas. P & S renounce the easy route of assuming a sudden genetic mutation wherewith some hominin immediately gained language abilities; likewise they reject the idea that there might be a single explanatory factor, such as sexual selection. Rather, the account should invoke as needed confluences of many factors and be ‘gradualist’, in the sense of assuming that small steps over millions of years resulted in anatomically modern human beings having full language. Guided by the known archeological evidence, the authors construct the sequence of small steps that might have arisen from the evolving needs of hominins in foraging, hunting, reproduction, and defense in changing environments. On this account early hominins possessed certain capacities for directing others’ attention through gestures (especially pointing (p. 99); see also Tomasello (2008)). Gestures could be combined with vocalizations, such as mimicry of animals, and further gestures, such as a stabbing motion, to produce a small advance in communicative abilities. Over millions of years the gestural aspect of communication receded in favor of the vocal aspect. Vocal units stabilized into words, the sequence of which carried significance as a kind of syntax. The evolution of technical skills in working stone, evidenced in the archeological record, shows that hominins developed the ability to bring long and complex sequences of actions under executive control, and did so in ways that were salient to others, not just to the maker. (p. 81) From this emerged ‘proto-languages’, characterized as communicative systems “in which agents produce and understand strings of wordlike terms: terms with displaced reference [that is, reference to items that are not perceptually present to speaker and hearer] and other semantic features of words . . . the sequences are not syntactically organized, or are so only in a very rudimentary way.” (p. 8) P & S think that the passage from proto-language to full language is considerably more difficult to reconstruct and understand than the passage from great ape communicative abilities to proto-language. They suggest that this final transition, although of course involving many factors, was primarily driven by the needs of larger-scale social cooperation, wherein proto-language met other proto-languages and the something like the linguistic development seen in pidgins took place.

     Unsurprisingly, the authors’ account is accordingly intricate and difficult to summarize. I note three key features of great interest:

     1. The emergence of language is based on gesture: On one recent theory (Mithen (2007) pre-human hominins possessed a kind of holistic proto-language of humming. P & S reject this because it renders the passage to segmented language unintelligible. By contrast, one can readily imagine that early hominins’ gesturing and miming could be regularly associated with distinctive vocalizations; as standardized pantomimed sequences developed and gesture declined in salience, something like communicatively operative, ordered sequences of sheer vocalizations could arise (pp. 96-7 and 126-128).

     2. But why would communicative gesture decline in salience? The authors speculate that the key driver was hominins’ developing control of fire and so the emergence of a new social site, the campfire. Along with the concomitant increased social complexity in roles of foraging for fuel and tending the fire, there emerged the lengthening of the day and assembling of groups for hours in semi-darkness. Accordingly gesture became less communicatively effective and the need for ways of non-visual communication increased.

     3. As noted above, P & S consider the passage from proto-language to full language especially difficult to explain. (p. 201) They suggest that the key drivers were the anatomically modern humans’ responses to the environmental stresses of global cooling and increased aridity in Africa starting around 190,000 years ago. One central response was to increasingly exploit marine resources for food. This intensified large-scale group territorial identities, as groups needed to defend their limited foraging areas. Accordingly the character of human cooperation changed and with that arose the need for the fuller language of “storytelling, a shared and rich ritual life, gossip, and explicit norms.” (p. 211) In this context P & S make their sole reference to a possible origin of visual art: the intensified exploitation of marine resources and the consequent development of communicative resources for building and sustaining large-group identities “cleanly explains the fact that the earliest unambiguous marks of symbolic behavior—including the much-discussed instances of abstract art—appear at coastal sites.” (ibid.)

     I have tried to indicate some of the book’s key points and their interrelations. There is a great deal more of exceptional interest in this highly intelligent book. Although I cannot discuss it here, I cannot resist mentioning Planer’s and Sterelny’s suggestion that another developmental sequence contributing to the emergence of language was one marked by the increasing group sharing of endorphins, from grooming (an endorphin rush for the hominin being groomed) to laughter (sharing the stimulated release of endorphins with a few fellow beings) to music and singing (group sharing). One might speculate that the authors’ discussions might contribute something to understanding the origins of the arts of music, dance, and theater. Very little in the book contributes to the understanding of the origins of visual arts; such contributions would have to consider at least the emergence of decoration and figurative marking and/or matters evidently relevant to these. Still, if nothing else, P’s & S’s proposal and brief development of the hypothesis of the emergence of abstract markings out of the novel needs and interests of foragers’ intensified exploitation of marine resources deserves consideration in any future account of the origins of the visual arts.

References:

Barry Allen, Artifice and Design: Art and Technology in Human Experience (2008)

Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981)

Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (1993)

Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body (2007)

Ronald J. Planer and Kim Sterelny, From Signal to Symbol: The Evolution of Language (2021)

Kim Sterelny, The Evolved Apprentice (2012)

Michael Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (2001)

-----The Origins of Human Communication (2008)

William Kentridge at UC Berkeley, Part Two: Ursonate (3/10/23)

      In my previous post I considered the question of why and how the artist William Kentridge, who has repeatedly said that all of his work begins with the impulse to draw, could view theatrical performances as part of a drawing-based artistic practices. My suggestion there is that such performances are practically inevitable given Kentridge’s conception of drawing and of an exhibition of drawing. On his conception, drawing is implicitly ‘performative’, and exhibitions are governed by an imperative to ‘make visible’, where what is to be made visible is first of all the temporally extended process wherein the drawing is made. It seems to me that there is nothing idiosyncratic about Kentridge’s conceptions here; they can plausibly be thought to draw out and articulate certain very basic, one might even say primordial, conventions in the making of visual art.

     To see this, consider the philosopher Richard Wollheim’s account of painting as an artistic activity. Wollheim proposes a model of what he calls ‘ur-painting’, a conceptual model that attempts to capture the marks of the basic capacities that are employed in artistic painting. At the most fundamental level, the artist marks a surface. And, primordially, the artist marks the surface with her eyes open so as to monitor the emergent expressiveness of the marking. Marking and observing are conceptually distinct though practically fused in a relation of feedback: the artist simultaneously marks, observes, responds to her marks, alters her marks, and further responds. Kentridge’s practical conception of drawing is two short steps in elaborating this: first, the conceptually distinct agents are figured, made visible in visually discernible iterations of Kentridge, with their roles saliently differentiated. Then, the figure of the observer can be multiplied, at least implicitly, to admit the further iterations of viewers outside the immediate moment of making in the studio—viewers past, present, and future. As Freud suggested, in dreams every person is (part of) oneself; so to every figure in a Kentridge performance is an aspect of Kentridge qua maker-artist. The palpable physical reality of the other performers relieves this conception of the threat of inflated narcissism, and secretes the opposed sense of the artist’s self arising in processes of inter-subjective and social play. This latter sense is perhaps most familiar from the pragmatist philosophy of G. H. Mead, or in the arts in the Mikhail Bakhtin’s conception of the polyphonic novel.

     I shall return to and elaborate Kentridge’s conception of performance in the next post on his ‘Waiting for the Sibyl’. I turn now to his recent performance of Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate. The visual artist and poet Schwitters was a participant in the Dada movement by 1920. He termed his art ‘Merz’ and incorporated into this new conception motifs introduced by Richard Wagner in the mid-19th century under the term ‘Gesamtkunst’ (total work of art), wherewith Wagner aimed at a new kind of opera of literary and theatrical elements fusing with the music into a quasi-ritualistic total spectacle. In the early 1920s many Dadaists either abandoned Dada altogether or at least significantly altered their practices. Schwitters continued making collages, but he renounced the aggressively non- or anti-sensical character of much Dadaist art. His artistic thinking generally took on a Constructivist dimension involving reduction of materials to visually simple or primitive elements, arrangement of such elements in arrays reminiscent of primordial patterns of center and margin, foreground and background, and primary, secondary, and tertiary salience. In searching for a kind of Gesamtkunst with his poetry, Schwitters looked to cabaret performance. With his visual art, Schwitters treated a ‘Merz-ian’ Gesamtkunst as ultimately an architectural construction with interior elements of traditional and novel visual arts. He wrote the Ursonate, a poem of nonsense syllables meant for performance, over a decade and published it in 1932. The poem was structured in a traditional musical sonata form of four movements with a coda. Schwitters claimed that the vowels were derived from simple German, and that the consonants were likewise ‘simple’. Schwitters recorded a performance of the poem, and it has been performed numerous times by others. Such performances were then instances of a music-centered Gesamtkunst, and usually emphasized rhythmic patterning of the nonsense syllables and salient micro-patterning through alliteration. Broad-scale structure is seemingly derived almost automatically through the appeal to the traditional, indeed ossified, sonata structural elements of first and second themes, variations, and an ordered sequence of movements including from allegro through scherzo to finale. (For the canonical exposition of sonata form and principle, see Rosen (1971)) This is no so much Constructivist but rather, as Schwitters explicitly stated, of a piece with the 1920’s ‘call to order’ in the arts whose greatest artistic achievements included Picasso’s and Stravinsky’s neo-classical works of that decade.

     Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kentridge largely replaces Schwitters’s music-based conception of the piece with the distinctive performative conception most characteristic of the theater of academic life: the lecture. Kentridge recites the piece from a lectern, while a film of his drawings on what seem to be pages of dictionaries and encyclopedias plays on a large screen behind him. With a repertoire of gestures, intonations, and phrasing, he works against the tendency of the piece to become musical, and instead expresses the nonsense sentences as if making a point, acknowledging the need for a qualification, digressing, refuting, and summarizing. This continues for much of the performance, until towards the end a very different conception literally breaks through: a saw from behind the projection pokes through the screen and cuts slashes; a trombonist enters from the side; another reciter approaches the stage from the audience. These figures join Kentridge on stage and each contributes their distinctive expressiveness, with the stroke of genius of the saw played as a musical instrument. Kentridge continues his nonsense lecturer, but is plainly pushed into secondary status by the more musical recitations of the other speaker, along with the spectacle of trombone and musical saw. Cabaret overwhelms the academy; life breaks in.

     In Kentridge’s hands, then, Ursonate is a self-undermining lecture, a piece of theater that is undermining by a resurgent theatricality, a lecture on life overwhelmed by life. Still, it’s a kind of demonstration piece of Kentridge’s poetics, perhaps appropriately, as he originally performed bits of it during lectures, but which then has something of the narrowness of focus that arises from trying to make a point. For a much richer and fuller realization of Kentridge’s conception of performance, I turn in the next blog post to his ‘Waiting for the Sibyl’.

References and Sources:

Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems in Dostoyevsky’s Poetics (1963)

John Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters (1985)

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)

George Herbert, Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (1934)

Charles Rosen, The Classical Style; Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (1971)

Kurt Schwitters, ‘My Sonata in Ur-Sounds’ (1927) and ‘Key for Reading Sound Poems’ (1946), in Myself and My Aims: Writings on Art and Criticism (2021)

Richard Wagner, ‘The Artwork of the Future’ (1849)

Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)

William Kentridge at UC Berkeley, Part One: Drawing as Theater

      The philosopher and historian Isaiah Berlin was fond of asking questions at parties in order to baffle, amuse, and stimulate conversation. One of his questions was: “Who is the second greatest Portuguese poet of the twentieth-century?” I’m not sure whether there was the unanimity then as there is now as to who the greatest one is (Fernando Pessoa), but I take it that then as now most of us non-Portuguese have no opinion on the second greatest, even in the unusual case that one knows another modern Portuguese poet. To my mind the question “Who is the second greatest contemporary visual artist?” has no evident answer; but the answer as to who the greatest has the same force, though probably not the unanimity, of the Portuguese question. The South African drawing artist William Kentridge initially rose to international prominence with his small number of animated films made over a decade starting in the early 1990s (I give an account of these in the first chapter of Rapko (2014)). In the past two decades he has continued making films, mostly shorts featuring himself in the studio, as well as drawings, sculptures, installations, designing and producing productions of operas, and writing and directing theatrical productions. He does not paint, and his artistic world is black: black charcoal on smudged whites, with rare instances of patches of blue and red. His artistic sources are mostly explicit in his work, with images from Dziga Vertov and Tatlin, the style of Max Beckmann, and techniques of staging associated with Meyerhold and Brecht. One negative feature of his work, practically an oasis in the desert of contemporary art, is the freedom from the models of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, and the impoverishing ideologies and artistic mechanisms associated with them. So there is nothing hinting at the contemporary commonplace that what makes an artifact a work of art is some single decision or choice by the artist. Likewise nothing in Kentridge turns on the simple separation of the institution of art from other spheres of value or of everyday life, and so a fortiori there is nothing of the recent, yet tired, appeal to the alleged frisson of ‘questioning’ that separation.

     One central part of the ideologies of contemporary art that Kentridge does fully embrace is the idea that there is a peculiar freedom in contemporary visual art to treat any material as a part or the whole of an artistic vehicle or medium. A dance, in however an expanded sense, will always center on corporeal movement; if a contemporary dance lacks movement, or lacks human bodies, those absences are marked as oppositions to the primordial convention of dance as structured movement. Similarly with music conceived as organized sound; John Cage’s silence is a limit case that throws unorganized sounds into the foreground. By contrast contemporary visual art treats anything, not just materials that afford encounters through visual perception, as a (potential) artistic vehicle. For visual art there is nothing analogous to the oppositions of corporeal movement and its contraries, or of organized sound and silence. The prototypical work of visual art is a static, bounded artifact, with actual works clustering around the two cores of marked surfaces (much of the world’s drawings and paintings) and three-dimensional figures and patternings (most of the world’s sculptures).  Contemporary art extends these classifications to include non-perceptual objects (conceptual art) and non-static works (film and performance). So too Kentridge, with his animations and performances. But do these performances embody conceptions of artistic making independent of Kentridge’s impulse to draw? Or are they rather extensions and elaborations of drawing?

     In his published discussions with the anthropologist Rosalind Morris, Kentridge himself has pointed to an answer to the question of the so to speak ‘drawing nature’ of his theater. Kentridge has repeatedly characterized his conception of the studio as ‘a safe space for stupidity’. Part of what this means is that he conceives of the studio as the place where one struggles to formulate questions, struggles to turn those questions into programs of making, proposes ideas that turn out to be ‘less good’, sees that what one has done is not what one intended to do, sees that the result is nevertheless interesting in a different way that what one had envisioned, and where one combines, juxtaposes, obscures, erases, and re-figures the ongoing results of these struggles. He hopes that at the level of the exhibition, these struggles are ‘made visible’. (Kentridge & Morris (8)) Now, one aspect of drawing is ‘play’, which evokes the contingencies, unpredictabilities, dead-ends, interactions, and sudden revelations of the drawing process. But another aspect of drawing is its ‘performance’, which is given by the sense that in drawing there are many personages present: the maker occupied with sheer marking; the reflective viewer who monitors the marking instant-by-instant; the viewers who raise questions about what is being done, what its effects, for the most part unintended, are. (11) ‘Theater’ means a place for viewing, and all the personages are viewers with distinctive concerns. The pressure to ‘make visible’ such a conception of drawing motivates, and almost necessitates, live performances as part of Kentridge’s artistic practice.

     About a decade ago Kentridge began including the recitation of part of Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate as part of his own lecture-performances. Starting in 2017 he has given a number of full performances of the piece as an instance of theater. In my next post I’ll give an account of his recent performance of the piece at UC Berkeley, and consider his motivation for and meaning in turning the poem from a piece to be recited to a piece to be performed.

References:

William Kentridge & Rosalind C. Morris, That which is not Drawn: Conversations (2014)

John Rapko, Logro, fracaso, aspiración: Tres intentos de entender el arte contemporáneo (2014)

Richter as a Negative Dialectician? Remarks on Darryn Ansted’s The Artwork of Gerhard Richter

One of the striking features of contemporary art is the peculiar authority granted to the artist to determine whether some artifact counts as one of the artist’s works of art. As with so much of the social myths surrounding contemporary art, this kind of authority is widely thought to have been somehow conjured into being by actions of Marcel Duchamp. In the1910s Duchamp inaugurated a sub-genre of visual art that he called ‘readymades’, whose instances were created by the artist’s declaration that this (this shovel, this urinal) is an artwork with such-and-such title. Further, the resultant artwork was thereby a work by the artist who made the declaration. So Duchamp did not declare that this shovel, now an artwork called ‘In Advance of a Broken Arm’, was a hitherto unrecognized work by Picasso or Matisse, but was a work by Duchamp; accordingly the work enters the oeuvre of Duchamp, along with paintings such as ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’. With the widespread recognition of the artistic possibility of artists making artworks by dubbing ordinary artifacts, it might be thought only a minor extension of this authority for the artist to declare that extant works seemingly by the artist are not, or at least no longer, by the artist. This further authority additionally bears the mark of tradition: artists have long destroyed or disowned works with which they’ve become dissatisfied; and just as a mature poet might not include any number of published poems in a volume of her collected poems, a mature artist might declare certain earlier works not part of her oeuvre, because the works are unserious or trivial, or so flawed as to be unworthy of inclusion, or perhaps because the making of the works was guided by conceptions and ideologies that the artist has repudiated. It is seemingly only a small step further for a young artist to exclude all her previous works outside her oeuvre, and to declare only those that she makes henceforth shall be part of her oeuvre. And so the possibility of Jasper Johns is born, who as a young artist who destroyed his previous work, dreamt of a flag, and acts as if his work (and so his oeuvre) would consist of the painting of the oneiric flag and everything thereafter.

     Having had some notable success as a mural painter in East Germany in the 1950s, Gerhard Richter fled to West Germany in 1961 and enrolled in the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, where he studied primarily with the painter Karl Otto Götz, who was affiliated with so-called ‘Informel’ art, a pan-Western European avant-garde movement, or at least sensibility, whose members as included Jean Fautrier and Lucio Fontana. Informel works typically involve the renunciation of narrative and realism, the use of non-traditional manners of painterly facture, and the renunciation of representation generally in favor of treating the canvas as an only roughly circumscribed arena that registers directly the artist’s gestures. The artistic ideologies of Informel art overlap with those familiar from what came to be called Abstract Expressionism in the United States. It is a commonplace in interpretations of Richter’s art that in 1961 Richter renounced both his murals of the 1950s and his older student works at Düsseldorf that experiment with Informel styles and ideologies, and began his artistic oeuvre with Table of 1961, a canvas that shows a depiction of a plain table over which has been laid loosely brushed swirls of paint so as to partially obscure the figure. In his recent book The Artwork of Gerhard Richter, Darryn Ansted argues, following a line of interpretation initiated by the art history Jeanne Anne Nugent, that much of the seeming unintelligibility of Richter’s works dissolves if by contrast one considers his ‘mature’ works in light of his earlier murals and student works. Beyond that, Ansted further argues that Richter’s mature artistic method is best understood by treating it as an instance of the conception of ‘negative dialectics’ introduced by the social philosopher Theodor Adorno in the 1960s. Finally, Ansted offers a series of interpretations of various works by Richter that attempt to consider some of his paintings either as instances of ‘deconstruction’ in the sense popularized by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, or as exhibiting claims and conceptions somehow reminiscent of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s claim that ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’.

     I have no confidence or interest in Ansted’s third claim concerning Derrida and Lacan, so I set it aside in favor of a summary of and reflection on his first two claims. Now, a basic consideration in interpreting Richter’s paintings is his oft-stated hatred of ‘ideology’, and his wish that his works be non- or anti-ideological. What does this mean, and how does this hatred manifest itself in artistic painting? Richter has also said that his works are instances of or expressive of doubt; accordingly one might think that Richter’s diagnosis of ideology is of a piece with that of other Eastern European intellectuals, like Leszek Kolakowski, of the state Communist period from the end of World War II through the late 1980s: namely, that ideologies are (i) ‘total’, in claiming to provide authoritative orientation towards important economic, cultural, and political issues; (ii) articulated linguistically and exhaustively expressed in a small number of texts; (iii) instituted in practice in a top-down by manner through directives from political authorities; (iv) not subject to questioning or doubt on pain of social ostracism or worse (for a representative example of such a conception of ideology, see Kolakowski (1990)). On Ansted’s plausible account, Richter acquired his antipathy to ideology from exposure in the 1950s to the East German advocacy of socialist realism in the arts and its denigration of ‘Western’ styles of ‘bourgeois’ or ‘elite’ painting involving abstraction. Under such circumstances, the restricted conception of an artistic ideology, such as one motivating realist styles, fuses with the broader conception of a total political ideology, such as state Communism. One immediate benefit, then, of Ansted’s interpretation is that it illuminates why Richter treats opposition to ‘ideology’ as among the most basic motivations for his artistic practice, wherein for decades he makes marked different kinds of paintings, in particular the ‘blurred’ realism of his paintings of photographs and the squeegeed layers of his abstracts. Richter’s refusal to work within a single style is an intelligible expression of his commitment to an anti-ideological artistic method.

      It would seem to follow for Richter that any use of any single artistic style would be an instance of ideology. While it is evident how the imperative of using multiple styles is fulfilled across his oeuvre, one wonders how it can be fulfilled within and by a single work. The key for Ansted is again in Richter’s early student work. Table manifestly contains two very different kinds of treatment, the drab realistic rendering of the table, and the obscuring non-figurative swirl. Ansted treats the swirl as an invocation of Informel art’s directly expressive gestures, while its placement with the realistic rendering deprives it of the sense of being an element of a system of making that dominates the canvas. Then Ansted notices that the viewer must think that table and swirl are not equal and balanced elements, but rather that, as obscuring, the swirl acts as if to withdraw the assertion ‘this is a (depicted) table’ to which the content of the painting might otherwise be delimited. Someone steeped in the philosophical works of German Idealism and its twentieth-century revisions and criticisms might put the content of the painting as ‘the positing (or assertion) of and its negation’.

     Since Table retains both the sense of something posited and something negated, and not of something and its opposite overcome, reconciled, and presented in a higher unity (as in Hegel’s conception), Ansted reaches for Adorno’s conception of negative dialectic as the conceptual model for Richter’s work. Adorno’s conception is complex (for accounts see Rosen (1982) and Geuss (2005)), but a key feature for Adorno and stressed by Ansted is that a negative dialectic is, put crudely and minimally, a movement of thought that does not come to a (provisional) conclusion, but rather one wherein the always provisional outcome places some act of classification (such as ‘this is a table’) against aspects of the object not included in the classification (especially its qualitative aspects such as color or texture). In a negative dialectic an object, its concept, and its conception are confronted with their ‘other’: not just any old other, but some of those aspects of the object that are part of a rich and replete experience of the object, but which are ignored in ordinary encounters in standard contexts. Since the presentation of the ‘other’ undermines something of the routine conception of the object, the negative dialectic can be thought of as a kind of internal criticism of experience, wherein relatively rich experience undoes relatively impoverished experience. The swirl in Table, then according to Ansted, is ‘destructive’; and although Ansted ignores the point, one might think that something of the sense of profundity of Table, if indeed there is such, comes from its re-articulation of the perennial sense of art embodying forces of creation and destruction. Conceptually, it is not as if a and not-a are balanced; rather something is done and undone, so there is an implied temporal directionality. Ansted goes on to treat the ‘blurring’ of images and squeegeeing of abstract painting characteristic of Richter’s mature work as immediate descendents of Table’s swirl, and thereby inheriting its destructive role in the quasi-dialectical process of his artistic making.

    So if Ansted’s account of Richter’s work is plausible and illuminating, it shows that consideration of Richter’s pre-canonical work, his murals and his student works, is necessary to make sense of the canonical works and Richter’s mature methodology, with its resolute opposition to ideology and refusal of use of a single style, both within works and across his oeuvre. As with my previous two blog posts considering books on Richter, I postpone full consideration of Ansted’s account and only here offer two critical comments:

     Ansted treats Adorno’s conception of negative dialectic as reasonably well-defined, prima facie coherent, and straight-forwardly useful in modeling Richter’s painting. But is this right? It’s striking that Ansted makes no reference to the lengthy studies and range of criticisms of Adorno. Consider Michael Rosen’s criticism: Rosen has argued that Adorno helps himself to Hegel’s technical terminology, in particular ‘mediation’. The term ‘mediation’  terms and its associated  conception play central roles in Hegel’s dialectic, and one might think that they gain whatever intelligibility and legitimacy they have only within Hegel’s system as a whole. But Adorno has explicitly rejected the key Hegelian role of ‘mediation’, a ‘moment’ of dialectical ‘sublation’ (Aufhebung) within the dialectic wherein contents and criteria are tested against each other, found wanting, and then ‘negated’, ‘preserved’, and ‘transcended’ into a new richer kind of experience. Rosen suggests that Adorno uses the term ‘mediation’ to disguise, perhaps including from himself, a conceptual gap in his account where there is no mechanism connecting intra-artistic forms and contents with broader social phenomena. Ansted makes nothing of ‘mediation’ in Richter or in what he takes from Adorno, but it’s striking that Ansted fails to notice the problematic way in which Richter invokes ‘ideology’ both in its positive sense as an artistic style and in its neutral or negative sense as a broad pattern of social phenomena including goals, aspirations, and plans. Perhaps something of the coldness people sense in Richter’s work comes from the way in which depiction is meant to stand immediately for something like Socialist (or Capitalist) Realism, and any and all abstraction for a Western and consumerist conception of freedom as choice without consequence.

      Then there is Ansted’s employment of the concept of an oeuvre: Ansted fails to notice that for the most part and in its typical employment the concept of an oeuvre is merely classificatory: it tells us which of the universe’s artifacts count as artworks attributed to such-and-such an artist, and which don’t. There may well be issues about whether something made by an artist is or ought to be included in an artistic oeuvre; but once a work is enrolled in an oeuvre, it ranks equally with every other work in the oeuvre. But is ‘oeuvre’ the most illuminating concept with which to grasp an artist’s total body of work? I and others have suggested that it is more illuminating to treat an artist’s body of work in terms of the concept of practice, which implies that the making of an artist’s works is guided by criteria of goodness. Following from the adoption of ‘practice’ (and not ‘oeuvre’) for explanatory purposes, one can make distinctions of relative failure and success, and relative centrality and marginality, within the artist’s body of work. Ansted by contrast imagines that sub-groupings of an artist’s work within an oeuvre are unmotivated constructions of imagination, and considers such constructions as elements of the deconstructive approach he uses in later chapters (and which I have not discussed here, but within which am unable to find something worth discussing (others of course might think otherwise)).

     In the next post reviewing recent literature on Richter, I turn to the great monument (or is it rather great obstacle?) of interpretations of the artist’s work, the various analyses given by the neo-Marxist critic Benjamin Buchloh and recently collected in a lengthy volume.

References:

Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (1966)

-----Aesthetic Theory (1970)

Darryn Ansted, The Artwork of Gerhard Richter: Painting, critical theory and cultural transformation (2017)

Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas & the Frankfurt School (1981)

-----‘Suffering and Knowledge in Adorno’ in Outside Ethics (2005)

Leszek Kolakowski, ‘Why an Ideology is Always Right’, in Modernity on Endless Trial (1990)

Jeanne Anne Nugent, “Overcoming Ideology: Gerhard Richter in Dresden, the Early Years”, in From Caspar David Friedrich to Gerhard Richter: German Paintings from Dresden (2006)

Michael Rosen, Hegel’s Dialectic and Its Criticism (1982)

Gerhard Richter as a Phenomenologist? --Remarks on Christian Lotz’s The Art of Gerhard Richter

     I continue my review of recent philosophical writing on the painter Gerhard Richter with a consideration of a line of interpretation expounded in Christian Lotz’s recent book. For Lotz a philosophical consideration of Richter seems especially appropriate in that Richter “is the philosopher in the world of painters—there is no doubt about that.” (221) Lotz seems to indicate three senses in which Richter is the most ‘philosophical’ of contemporary painters. First, there is the sense that basic aspects Richter’s artistic conceptions and poetics involve general claims or diagnoses, that is, Richter takes a stance towards not this or that conception of representation or expression, but towards representation and expression as such. Second, there is the sense that Richter’s artistic practice is uniquely philosophical in its rigor and consistency; Richter’s initial mature works of the early-mid 1960s embody certain characterizations of modern art and modern painting, photography as a medium, and diagnoses of contemporary life that never vary thereafter, and that these characterizations and diagnoses govern Richter’s artistic practice for some sixty years. And finally there is Lotz’s claim that a central aspect of Richter’s creative process is best understood as modeled on a distinctively philosophical conception and method, namely the so-called ‘phenomenological reduction’ first introduced and propounded by Edmund Husserl. This third sense is particularly important for Lotz’s interpretation of Richter, in that this reduction models the artistic mechanism wherewith Richter works photographs into paintings, a mechanism that can quite plausibly be construed as the most distinctive, and among the most basic, of Richter’s artistic procedures.

     Before attempting an interpretation of Richter’s works, Lotz sketches an account of the basic conceptual resources that are needed for and that he will mobilize in interpreting Richter. Although the title of Lotz’s book is ‘The Art of Gerhard Richter’, oddly Lotz does not include an account of art or artistic painting among such resources. Rather, Lotz’s central concept for interpretive and explanatory purposes is image, which he gives a highly technical construal through appropriating remarks and analyses from several philosophers from disparate traditions, and most prominently the philosopher of hermeneutics Hans-Georg Gadamer and the neo-Kantian philosopher of culture Ernst Cassirer. For Lotz paintings are images (67), and are throughout the book strongly contrasted with photographs as exhibiting different kinds of reference, meaning, and roles in understanding the world. I take Lotz’s view of photographs to be the following: A photograph is always a photograph of something. When a photograph focally presents some person X, the photograph is about person X. And generally, the subject, what the photograph is about, is something external to the photograph itself.

     On Lotz’s account, by contrast images are (always?) much richer in content than photographs, at least in respect that they exhibit a greater internal complexity than a photograph. An image (i) is an artifact arising from a temporally extended formation, and (ii) retains some sense of this temporal extension ‘within’ itself, that is, as part of its content. Whereas a photograph always retains its indexical link with what it is about, an image is ‘distanced’ from that which it is about by virtue of the fact that it is a product of a process of formation, wherein whatever materials stimulated or are incorporated into its formative process are worked over, synthesized, and articulated (Lotz calls this ‘condensation’). This process of working is also a process of simplification, as the image-maker necessarily selects only parts and aspects of the materials for incorporation into the formed image. And because the image embodies a condensation and simplification of its integrated materials, what an image is about is not an individual (as is the case with a photograph), but rather something more general. Following aspects of the phenomenological tradition, Lotz says that an image presents or is about an ‘essence’. (Perhaps one alternative way of suggesting Lotz’s point is to recall Aristotle’s claim that poetry is more philosophical than history, in that history presents particulars and poetry presents possibilities.) Because the ‘essence’, which is the subject of the image, does not precede the formation of the image, the subject is ‘internal’ to the image. Finally, following Gadamer, Lotz claims that because the image is addressed to some (future) viewer, both maker and viewer are part of a larger structure wherein their subjectivity resonates with each other’s, and both do so as directed to something ‘objective’, that is, the image narrowly construed. The act of viewing an image is there a kind of ‘participation’, wherein the three mutually defining and interacting elements (maker, viewer, and image) emerge together. This mutual engagement is ‘festive’, a kind of celebration of each element in itself and of others.

     Since Lotz’s account of the image is built upon the contrast between photograph and painting qua image, its application to Richter’s work is straightforward. Lotz’s first extended example is the painting ‘Youth Portrait’ (1988) from Richter’s 18 October 1977 that depicts a photograph of the young Ulrike Meinhof, who later became one of the central figures of the so-called Baader-Meinhof group whose incarceration and deaths are the subjects of the photographs that Richter used as material for the series. Unsurprisingly, Lotz claims that the photograph is ‘about’ an individual, Meinhof, whereas the painting “offers us a view of what it means to be a human like Meinhof through looking at her. Put differently, Meinhof becomes an instantiation of humanity.” (81) More interestingly, Lotz treats the distinctive meaningfulness of the painting as arising from Richter’s choice of the particular photograph, combined with his manner of treatment. The photograph shows Meinhof “before she became a terrorist”, and so the painting contains as part of its content the knowledge that she was to become a terrorist. Thereby the painting embodies a ‘tension’: “the true conflict [in the painting] is between seeing (presence) and memory (absence).” (114) Richter’s restriction of colors to blacks, whites, and grays serves two purposes: the sense of the image (in the restricted sense) as formed is highlighted, and the emergence of the face out of seeming neutral and mediocre handling is dramatized. In the painting the face is an event. (115) Meinhof seems to gaze to the viewer’s left, with a touch of the inwardness associated with the film director Robert Bresson’s characters, so intensifying the sense that although something of Meinhof is present, she remains distanced and unknowable. As Lutz puts it: “The desire of the spectator to look at her is blocked by the painting itself; for the gaze does not speak to us but remains silent. Ultimately, this distancing makes the painting even more beautiful, insofar as it refuses our desire to see her.” (116) He concludes by claiming that what makes this painting in particular “so telling” is that it “reflects on one of the main categories of hermeneutic aesthetics, which is mimesis.” (124)  ‘Mimesis’ is conceptually richer than (mere) imitation, in that it includes, so Lotz claims, further something of the sense of how that which is imitated has come to be what it is, and correlatively some sense of understanding of the imitated thing and its genesis.

     Lotz summarizes the interpretation as follows: “the painting imitates something, namely a young person. Accordingly, it builds up specific relations and throughout its interpretation, which requires our participation, it brings out the young person as something. It lets us understand the young person as human corruption. Moreover, it helps us understand this human corruption in an image and, accordingly, it lets us see what human corruptibility is.” (125)

     Lotz goes on to consider a handful of other paintings by Richter as somewhat lesser length. But perhaps enough has been said to raise questions about the account that Lotz offers. 1. It is a peculiar feature that a book entitled ‘The Art of Gerhard Richter’ has nothing to say about the concept of art. For the most part the book silently equates images with artistic paintings, but there is not a word in the book that provides any support for the equation. Lotz never acknowledges the basic point that not all paintings are works of art; likewise, he passes over any consideration of whether and in what sense poems, buildings, pots, or songs are or might be images. 2. Lotz models a central feature of Richter’s practice, the passage from (chosen) photograph to made painint, upon Husserl’s ‘phenomenological reduction’. But Lotz fails to note that Husserl gave a number of different accounts of the reduction, and seemed to indicate that there is more than one kind of reduction. Further, Lotz ignores the standard criticisms of Husserl’s account, in particular that it seems to presuppose the acceptance of an unmotivated methodological solipsism: all of ‘existence’, both of nature and the world, are supposed to be ‘bracketed’, and the act of reduction is seemingly carried out without invoking any aspect of intersubjectivity or sociality. The point of invoking the reduction seems to be to underwrite Richter’s claim that photographs and paintings are ‘completely different’, and in particular that a painting, unlike the photograph that it depicts, is in no sense ‘about’ the focal object or person depicted. But is this right? 3. Accordingly, and like Florian Klinger’s account given in my previous blog post, Lotz inherits from Richter an implausibly restrictive conception of photography that makes it a conceptual impossibility for a photograph to be a work of art. In endorsing without criticism Richter’s diagnosis of photography, Lotz like Klinger turns a particular diagnosis into a philosophical absurdity.

     I will return to Lotz’s claims in a few weeks after finishing the critical summaries of the recent literature on Richter. Next I turn to Darryn Ansted’s The Artwork of Gerhard Richter: Painting, Critical Theory, and Cultural Transformation.

References:

Aristotle, Poetics

Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (1944)

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (1960)

--The Relevance of the Beautiful (1987)

Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1913)

Christian Lotz, The Art of Gerhard Richter: Hermeneutics, Images, Meaning (2015)

Gerhard Richter, Gerhard Richter: Writings, 1961-2007 (2009)

Trying to Understand Gerhard Richter, Part One: Florian Klinger’s Theory of Form: Gerhard Richter and Art in the Pragmatist Age (2022)

     One way to approach the work of the German painter Gerhard Richter is to think that it represents three major and only partially overlapping events: a contribution to the history of artistic painting, a prolonged flurry in the history of taste, and an episode in the attempts to bring philosophy to bear on understanding the arts. Born in 1932, Richter is surely the best known and most written about painter of his generation. Best known perhaps for his figurative works that are in every case based upon some photograph, he has also produced a large number of typically large abstract paintings, first some peculiar color charts, large grids of individually differing color samples, then from the 1980s to the present paintings produced by passing squeegees multiple times over differentiating fields of paint. Along with his rigid practice of basing figurative paintings on photographs, a second peculiarity of Richter’s oeuvre is his maintenance of a strict separation of abstracts and figurative works; each work falls comfortably and wholly under one or the other category, and so there is no instance in his oeuvre of the semi-abstracts and/or loosely figurative works so common in modern art, as with de Kooning’s women or landscapes. A third characteristic of his work is his consistent use of techniques resulting in a ‘blur’. This is plain in any of his figurative works, where the figure depicted seems as if in soft focus or a mist. Analogously, the use of the squeegee in the abstract paintings produces a stupefyingly complex micro-texture of ‘blurrings’, skeins and layerings resistant to linguistic description, as the numerous deposits of paint are subjected mechanically to a dragged bar that leaves them distended, pocketed, and blended. The result of the unvaryingly sustained use of these practical conceptions and associated techniques—the reliance upon photographs; the strictly maintained distinction between abstract and figurative works; the unvarying appearance of blurs—gives almost any work by Richter the feel of a puzzle and challenge to the viewer: Why do this, working within such idiosyncratic imperatives? Why so many prohibitions? What diagnosis, what theory, what poetics guides so strictly this peculiar body of work?

      As part of a great shift in taste in recent art Richter’s work began to be shown in New York City in the 1980s, along with paintings by Sigmar Polke, Anselm Kiefer, and other living German artists. As with a slightly earlier appearance of works of now largely forgotten Italian artists including Enzo Cucchi and Sandro Chia, the efflorescence of manifestly ambitious and sophisticated works from outside the small world of Soho and East Village studios and galleries marked a shift away from the New Yorkers’ native trivializing artistic conceptions and projects--end-game aesthetics (Peter Halley), commercialist titillations (Jeff Koons), and feverish trend-sniffing (Ashley Bickerton)--, and towards works that addressed the great issues of historical traumas and the rise and fall of ideologies. While Polke’s anarchic stylistic heterogeneity and high-spirited experimentalism left him forever unassimilable, and Kiefer’s grand gestures were self-glorifying and could never shake off the sense that they were somehow of a piece with the tragedies they addressed, Richter’s work became a focal concern for any consideration of the achievements and limitations of distinctively contemporary art. Richter’s reputation seemed to culminate with the comprehensive exhibition of his work at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art in 2002, and its catalog monograph by the curator Robert Storr immediately became the standard orientation in English to Richter’s work. Storr treats Richter as one of the central artists of our time, and one whose work is particularly notable for its engagement with the basic conditions and ideologies of modern and contemporary art.

     And of course the counter-reaction was quick: in the New Republic the art critic Jed Perl published a thorough-going attack on Richter’s work. On Perl’s account Richter was a ‘charlatan’ whose work was built upon a “counterfeit crisis” of the status of painting after its alleged death. Richter is a “phony Kafka”, pretending to be distressed while keeping an eye on his audience. But painting, Perl says, had never died, and so the extremism of Richter’s conceptions was unmotivated, except as a way of playing to the jaded tastes of contemporary curators and gallery-hoppers.  Fundamentally, “Richter is a post-Duchampian message artist” who “gives us nothing to look at”. Perl notices that there is a great deal of discussion of and writing on Richter’s work, as well as large number of published interviews with and writings by Richter himself; Perl contents himself with asserting that this “chatter that swarms around his work is full of brain crushers”, which he seems to think is a very bad thing.

     So both Richter’s prominent proponents and detractors agree that his work is a focus of interest and discussion in contemporary art. They further agree that it presents especially difficult interpretive challenges on account of its peculiarly strict self-imposed practical conceptions and prohibitions, while simultaneously offering no as visually evident guidance in recovering the motivation for this unique poetics. In this and several successive blog posts, I’ll briefly review four (but by no means all) of the major books on Richter published in the past decade, with a short statement of critical questions for each, and then on the basis of these offer a fuller, more general assessment of the current state of thinking about Richter’s work. The writings discussed are all ‘philosophical’, construed loosely. That is, they all address basic features of Richter’s practice, including inter alia the diagnosis of modern art and culture that partially motivates his poetics, the issue of Richter’s peculiar kind of consistency and comprehensiveness, and associated concerns that touch on epistemology, ethics, pragmatism, and critical theory.

     I begin with the Florian Klinger’s short, densely argued, difficult book, recently published in translation from the German original of 2013. Klinger stays close to Richter’s own explicit verbal formulation; the great majority of the book’s 342 footnotes give the source of quotations of Richter, mostly from his collected writings. The book as a whole, Klinger writes, is a philosophical elaboration of Richter’s remarks on his own poetics, a conception that Klinger endorses “without reservation.” (3) Klinger argues that the key to understanding Richter’s work is to grasp his distinctive, indeed unique, conception and employment of the concept of ‘form’. Richter’s conception of form must first of all be distinguished from various inherited metaphysical and artistic conceptions. So here ‘form’ has nothing to do with Aristotle’s hylomorphism whereby form (morphe) combines with matter (hyle) in giving an entity its identity. Nor does Richter’s form have anything to do with traditional artistic distinction between form and content; form does not play the ‘how’ to content’s ‘what’. Nor, finally, is form here a rough synonym for ‘composition’ as designating the particular selection of contents, arrangement, and internal hierarchical ordering in an artwork.  Klinger considers all such inherited conceptions of form to be ‘metaphysical’, and he thinks that a core motivation for Richter is to dispense with metaphysical conceptions and develop an alternative. Put positively (and initially mysteriously), form is “a singular act of distinction” (2) that arises in a ‘reaction’. Klinger calls this conception of form ‘pragmatist’, seemingly because this form is (the result of) something done, and in each case done the relevant act is done without being rigidly determined by rules or actually existing conventions. This conception of action without guidance gives Klinger’s and Richter’s scheme an existentialist tinge, as they insist that in each case in acting and making one must decide, as Richter says, or judge, in Klinger’s preferred formulation.

     Klinger then insists on a further point: there are two kinds of form on the pragmatist conception, the non-artistic and the artistic. Form in its non-artistic sense is just the result of an everyday action construed pragmatically. In his work Richter aims to achieve artistic form, which is first of all a “surpassing of nonartistic reality,” the sort of reality achieved in everyday action. (54) The most general way of articulating how artistic form is achieved is that Richter (a) identifies oppositions or contraries or different dimensions of depiction, such as figuration and abstraction, or reference (which Klinger refers to as ‘mimesis’) and making (which Klinger refers to as ‘performance’); and then (b) paints in such a way in such a way that a resultant picture maintains ambiguously the characteristics and values of each member of the pair. When Richter achieves this, so Klinger maintains, he has avoided the semantic reduction of the painting to one or the other: every successful work of Richter’s has something of the characteristics of both the figurative and the abstract, of both painting as something referring to the world and as something expressive of its own making. In these many cases Richter has achieved ‘potentiation’, that is, not mere actualization of this or that feature of the world or bit of reality, but rather grasping and presenting the bit of reality more richly than it is given in everyday experience.

     For Klinger the paradigm of Richter’s  manner of achieving artistic form is given in his ‘first’ work, that is, the first work he acknowledges as part of his oeuvre after the loss or intentional destruction of the works of his teens and twenties, Table of 1962. Klinger is surely right to note that this piece is “a kind of manifesto” for Richter. The painting depicts a bare table that occupies much of the canvas, with its leading left corner just breaking the canvas’s edge. Over the table Richter has laid a dark ‘whorl’ of paint that obscures perhaps half of the tabletop and much of the table’s base and legs. In the literature on Richter it is not untypical to treat the whorl as a blot, something to break the ease of identification of the painting’s subject as a table. Further that this is meant to be understood as a rejection (or ‘critique’ or ‘negation’) of the customary sense of pictorial subject matter as identical with what is depicted; and so by implication also a rejection of the inherited ideological framework (whatever that might be) that renders the identification of subject with content as automatic and unproblematic. The customary interpretation, however, is plausible only at a first glance; upon further inspection “the painting proves to be a quasi-didactic tutorial that thematizes the distinction between the two spheres [of figuration and abstraction].” So instead of treating figuration and abstraction as contraries, Richter makes them elements of “one form.” (23) This initial manifesto piece is the paradigm of Richter’s way with contraries, in the service of the pictorial ‘potentiation’ that is the mark of artistic form.

     Klinger then applies this point to the interpretation of Richter’s unvarying use of photographs, and not direct views of nature, as material, and the similarly invariable ‘blurring’ of the depiction. According to Klinger, Richter conceptualizes a photograph as a piece of the (non-artistic) world, something that registers an object or event from a single point of view. Richter’s characteristic blurring of the figural content is a way of “equalizing surface” (27), in a twofold sense: the blurring eliminates detail, and so the surface of the painting calls for an even attention whereby no part is allegedly of greater weight or attractiveness than any other; additionally, the blurring draws attention to the surface and so works to undercut the sense that figure and virtual ground, as well as paint and canvas, are of two different orders. Again, as with Table, what is shown is an extraordinarily unified form (in Richter’s and Klinger’s idiosyncratic sense).

     In what seems to me the most penetrating passage in the book, Klinger places the blurring within a sequence of four ‘operations’ that jointly characterize Richter’s creative process, the collective aim of which is to ‘amplify’ the chosen material (in Klinger’s technical vocabulary, what I refer to as ‘chosen material’ is rather ‘the mimetic substrate’) in the service of ‘potentiation’. (52-54) The blurring is part of a first stage wherein the material is also painted with non-expressive gestures and generally simplified. In this stage of a figurative work the depicted content (say, a chair) loses its individuality as this chair; in an abstract painting the material (even if originally figurative) “is dissolved into pure form, that is, is rendered completely unrecognizable” (53). Klinger then (puzzlingly, to my mind) asserts that in a second stage the painting contains no “less overall information”, and so since it is also an articulation of the initial material, it presents more information. Klinger likeness this to the way in which the presentation of something actual together with its potentials to be otherwise necessarily is a richer presentation than the mere actual thing as such. Thirdly, this invokes a greater range of possibilities than what is presented, as the various aspects of the depiction “potentiate one another reciprocally through their resonance with each other.” (ibid) What Klinger seems to mean by this is that, despite the equalization of surface, a painting by Richter retains some sense of areas, sub-regions, elements, or parts, and these interact with each other in creating a further dimension of meaningfulness. Finally, these dimensions and parts of the painting are nested within each other in orders of attention from microstructures to the picture as a whole, and the part-part and part-whole relations invoked, and play of analogies among them, provide a fourth level of resonance.

     The remaining two thirds of the book can be summarized more briefly. Klinger argues that Richter’s oeuvre addresses two further tensions. First, Richter determinedly rejects any “established standards or criteria.” (55), but also seeks to overcome the threat that his works are arbitrary. Klinger asserts that the works resolve, or rather perhaps sustain, this antinomy between (total) determination through convention and arbitrariness by creating a ‘binding power’ (Verbindlichkeit), by creating and sustaining the possibility of ‘communicability’ and ‘connectivity’ in their individual and collective reception. Richter thinks he achieves this by beginning the artistic process with chance elements—this or that whatever, be it figurative or abstract--, then working his operations until he recognizes a sui generis ‘rightness’ embodied in the work. It seems to me that Klinger struggles mightily to articulate what this rightness consists in, but perhaps this a problem that is not unique to Richter but is rather a general issue in attempting to give a non-reductive explanation of artistic originality.

     As Klinger notes (84), the third tension is difficult to state. He calls it “the tension of deficiency and redemption”, and his explication of it seems to attribute to Richter a pessimism about this world of ours so total that it seems like something from the imaginative world of Arthur Schopenhauer. The deficiency is this: what is given to us merely is; it calls for nothing; it seeks no meaning; it induces no transformation through further practical, cognitive, or imaginative activities. Moreover, what is given is painful; our world, unjust as it is hopeless, consists of unrelieved strings of cruelty and crime. (86) Such a world calls for redemption, but neither Christian salvation nor Platonic ascent to timelessness provide viable models of redemption for the modern world. To sustain and overcome this third tension, Richter (according to Klinger) recurs to the concept of form, and in particular the pragmatist sense that the artistic reaction to the given is a transformation of the given. The artistic transformation of the given is a non-utopian improvement of the given. So art in Richter’s hands replaces the strict dichotomy of fallen and redeemed with the differential sense of relatively worse and relatively better. This strikes me as the least convincing of Klinger’s three major analyses; here, and not only here, Klinger seems to try to solve a problem or dissolve a tension simply through re-definition or re-description.

     There is a great deal more to Klinger’s densely argued book than I have the space to address here. Additionally, I must note that in my account I have largely avoided using Klinger’s own technical vocabulary, and with it some of his qualifications and elaborations that are specific to that vocabulary. I would think that Klinger would accept my account as only very partially summarizing his book, although I hope to have accurately characterized the core of the book, Klinger’s analysis of Richter’s four ‘operations’ in the service of producing artistic form.

     As I shall return to the evaluation of Klinger’s account after reviewing three other recent books on Richter, here I restrict myself to some brief general remarks. 1. As I noted early on, Klinger largely restricts himself to endorsing and elaborating Richter’s own remarks. At only a couple of points in the great many dozens of quotations does he suggest that Richter’s understanding of the relevant issue might be only partial or awry. Klinger also stresses that Richter’s conception, though in a very general way is drawn from the same poetic resources as the conceptions of Duchamp and especially John Cage, is unique. Part of the effect of this manner of investigation and analysis is to secrete the sense that Richter’s work is literally incomparable. But one might think that if there are no significant continuities between Richter and other advanced contemporaneous practitioners in the arts, and between Richter’s oeuvre and modern art, and painting as an art generally, then the sense in which Richter’s practical conception is an artistic conception becomes obscure. 2. As noted, Klinger’s account of Richter’s dealings with the third tension seem paradigmatically pragmatist: a dichotomy is set up and expounded, and it is addressed pragmatically, which in part means that a dichotomy that had seemed fixed and unbridgeable is replaced by a differentiated spectrum of possibilities, especially potential ways of acting. But the sense that something is achieved, in thought if not in practice, by the pragmatist re-description depends in part on the seeming compellingness, the cognitive salience and social institutionalization of both elements of the dichotomy. But as noted the third tension depends initially on the plausibility and attractiveness of the quasi-Schopenhauerian picture of the world as deficient, aimless, and meaningless. But nothing speaks for this picture; and if not, then the motivation for the pragmatist re-description dissolves. 3. Similarly, the very motivation for Richter’s restriction to photographs as material is of a piece with his pessimistic diagnosis; photographs are always and only ways of rigidly registering the things of this (bad) world. But is this remotely plausible? One evident implication of Richter’s view is that there is no such thing as an art of photography. But how then do we make sense of Atget, Cartier-Bresson, Jeff Wall, and so many others?

     Working towards the present in the literature on Richter, I turn in my next blog post to Christian Lotz’s The Art of Gerhard Richter.

References:

John Dewey, Experience and Nature (1925)

Florian Klinger, ‘to make that judgment; the pragmatism of Gerhard Richter’, in Judgment and Action: Fragments Toward a History [BF447. J832]

-----Theory of Form: Gerhard Richter and Art in the Pragmatist Age (2022)

Jed Perl, ‘Saint Gerhard of the Sorrows of Painting’, in Magicians & Charlatans (2012)

Gerhard Richter, Gerhard Richter: Writings, 1961-2007 (2009)

Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting (2002)

Jonathan Lear’s Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life—A Critical Appreciation

     A couple of years after the philosopher of art Richard Wollheim’s death I went to a memorial panel at a meeting of the American Philosophy Association. Attending a conference is among my rarest and least favorite activities, while falling asleep during lectures (mostly other people’s) is one of my habitual pleasures. I don’t remember who was on the panel other than the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear, whose writings on Aristotle, psychoanalysis, and moral psychology have been among my regular reading for over thirty years. As my eyes drooped during someone else’s presentation, I noticed Lear looking at my intently. I was alarmed, though not enough to keep me awake, because I knew that Lear often illustrated psychoanalytic points with his own observed vignettes. I briefly wondered whether an account of my dozing would someday open an essay by Lear on resistance or stupidity.

     Unsurprisingly to me, Lear’s new book opens with a description of something he witnessed after a lecture. Having heard a lecture on the Anthropocene suggesting that the age in which humans dominate the Earth is coming to an end, “a young academic stood up and said simply, “Let me tell you something: We will not be missed!” She then sat down. There was laughter throughout the audience. It was over in a moment.” (p. 1) The first chapter is a philosophical reflection of astonishing brilliance and profundity on the remark. Lear first notes that the ‘official meaning’ of the statement is of cosmic justice, in that we humans, a greedy, aggressive, earth-destroying species, won’t be missed because “we do not deserve to be missed”. (p. 2) We the guilty species deserve to be punished, but since the joke itself is our imaginary construct, in saying it and laughing we get to construct and enact the punishment on ourselves, and enjoy doing it. (p. 5) Lear then notes that the manner of ‘not being missed’ is atypical of human life, where the disappearance someone who ‘is not missed’ means that life can return to normal, and whatever damage was done by that person can be mourned. But if we know now that we won’t be missed, why not start mourning now? Because, Lear suggests, the joke ‘says’ that it’s too late to mourn. If there’s no ‘us’ in the future, mourning now is of no value, as there will be no future us to follow the normal course and end of mourning, which ends with the return to normality. So the joke is also an attack on the value and possibility of our contemporary morning, and so “is an expression of despair.” (p. 7) Why do we despair? Take your pick: the pandemic; the end of democracy; climate change; human-induced mass extinctions; the poisoning and destruction of the environment.

     Lear’s response to the joke, and the contemporary sense of despair that makes it seem funny and inevitable, is first of all to mount a philosophical defense of mourning as a sign of human health. The materials for this defense are provided by Lear’s constant sources, Sigmund Freud and Aristotle. For the remainder of the first chapter attempts to ‘take the energy out of despair’ by recalling basic points from those two authors. In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ Freud notes that humans have ‘a capacity for love’, and that mourning a lost loved one is an exercise of this capacity wherein we transform the pain of loss into a livable and flourishing psychology of memories, emotions, and acts of imagination related to the loved one. Adapting the opening of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, the announcement that all humans by nature desire to understand, Lear then asserts that in the suffering of mourning we are striving to understand the meaning of our loving attachments. Immediately generalizing to the doctrine of Hans Loewald, his own teacher in psychoanalysis, Lear asserts that “mourning broadly understood is pervasive in human life. Indeed, it is constitutive of human development.” (p. 12; see also Lear (2017), p. 194) So mourning is part of human flourishing at every stage of life, as in every moment of human development there is a “bidding adieu to earlier forms of experiencing.” (p. 13)

      None of this as yet constitutes an answer that disables the power of the joke, since if human life does not deserve to continue, it hardly matters what counts as its flourishing. What is the value of, and the value in, human life, the absence of which is a supreme reason for regret, and the presence of which gives human life a justified and self-justifying quality? Aristotle thought that the highest good of human life was eudaimonia or ‘happiness’, which consists in having had a fortunate upbringing, developing one’s character, and living in a manner that involves the regular and sustained exercise of a number of virtues or ‘excellences’. A happy life is ‘kalon’, a Greek term which cannot be well translated with a single term, and is usually translated as something like ‘noble/beautiful/fine’. (p. 16) The kalon ‘shines forth’ in the characteristic actions of a happy life, and such a life is “itself satisfying, experienced as meaningful and worthwhile and, as such, pleasure.” (p. 17, with regard to a generous person living generously) Mourning and the kalon are intertwined: mourning is itself kalon, and mourning the kalon is what the joke fails to recognize, that our capacity to anticipate the kalon going out of existence allows us to mourn the impoverished universe without us (ibid). The recognition of this destroys the charm of the joke and “drain[s] the humor right out of it.” (p. 19)

     Much of the rest of the book develops this ‘expanded idea of mourning’ (p. 143) in short essays starting from particular incidents, such as a remark by Meghan Markle or Lincoln’s delivery of the Gettysburg Address, or from writings, including a startling re-interpretation of Freud’s great meditation ‘On Transience’. A final chapter turns to the emotion of gratitude and investigates the senses in which it, like mourning, is part of the basic moral psychology of humans. Whereas mourning is an expression of the on-going ways in which humans transform mere change in meaning, gratitude is a basic way in which humans create a realm of freedom together: the recipient of a gift freely given co-creates with the giver a relationship promising an “open space of generosity and its recognition” wherein “there are no set rules to follow”, and tinged with the hope of a quasi-timeless cycle of further “developments, re-creations, and repairs.” (pp. 128-9) Lear triumphantly concludes that with the expanded idea of mourning and the recognition of the ever-present possibility, and sometimes practice of gratitude “loneliness is out of the question . . . It [mourning (and together with gratitude)] is an openness to being a beneficiary via activities of imagination and memory, receptiveness, and acknowledgement.” (p. 143) This openness is part of what gives meaning and value to individual human lives and to human life as a whole, and so is part of what is attacked in the joking ‘We will not be missed’.

      There is a great deal of interest in the detailed analyses beyond what I’ve summarized here. I would not wish to have skipped a single page of the book. I would like to call attention to two further interrelated points in the book. Part of the claim about the nature and value of mourning is embedded within an account of what here and elsewhere Lear refers to as a ‘crisis of intelligibility’, a socio-cultural phenomenon that he had previously explored at some length in the book Radical Hope. Such crises are collective, not individual; social, not psychological; and practical, not theoretical. The crisis occurs when an entrenched, habitual way of living, and in particular the concepts and institutions central to that kind of life, lose their viability. A simple example of such a crisis would when the institution of marriage dies out; then a broad range of attitudes, practices, rituals, ideals, etc. loses its social viability. With the loss of the institution of marriage people would still understand a great deal of what marriage had been, but would lose the sense of how to carry on in many situations. So the present seems disconnected from the past, and there seems no authoritative guidance in how to act in and for the future. One might think with Lear that widespread reactions to the pandemic or the vivid contemporary awareness of the late Anthropocene’s environmental destructiveness are signs of such crises. So mourning and expressing gratitude are ways of carrying on, and instances of cultural creativity that undo something of the sense of disorientation characteristic of crises of intelligibility. The second closely connected point concerns Lear’s emphasis on radical renewal. The use of the term ‘radical’ points to the (alleged) fact that such crises are crises of a way of life as a whole. So a viable response to the crisis must not merely tinker with parts of the way of life or reform one or another sphere of life, but must re-think and re-imagine the way of life in its entirety, at least in the sense of re-doing concepts, practices, and institutions that seem to pervade that manner of living and give it something of its distinctive character. I note this because at times it seems that Lear struggles, and not successfully, to get these two points about crises of intelligibility and radical renewal into focus, in particular because of the lack of a sociological dimension of his thinking, which would bring a more differentiated set of concepts to bear upon the issues. For example, when Alasdair MacIntyre addressed epistemological crises or the nature of intelligibility (see MacIntyre (2006), originally published in 1977, and (1986)) he notes that intelligibility is conferred not just by the role that an action plays in an established routine, but also in a variety of traditions (themselves involving internal contestations about the application, meaning, and significance of central concepts) and narratives. Lear’s use of the term ‘intelligibility’ by contrast makes no distinction among these kinds of intelligibility, and he seems to be referring at times to one, at other times to others, and at times indiscriminately among them. Nothing about this, it seems to me, damages any important remark or analysis in the book in a way that could not be remedied with some further clarifications. In any case I hope that this new masterwork by Lear finds the wide and appreciative audience it deserves.

References:

Aristotle, Nicomachaean Ethics and Metaphysics

Sigmund Freud, ‘On Transience’ (1916)

-----‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917)

Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope (2006)

-----‘Mourning and Moral Psychology’ in Wisdom Won from Illness: Essays in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (2017)

-----Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life (2022)

Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Epistemological crises, dramatic narrative, and the philosophy of science’ in The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays, Volume 1 (2006)

-----‘The Intelligibility of Action’ in Rationality, Relativism and the Human Sciences (1986), ed. Margolis, Krausz, and Burian

A Non-Conservative Defense of Contemporary Painting?—Remarks on Jason Gaiger’s Philosophy of Painting

      In his new book Philosophy of Painting, the philosopher Jason Gaiger notes that there has been little writing by philosophers of contemporary art. Gaiger attempts to remedy something of this deficiency with a chapter devoted to contemporary painting. The new book is a lightly edited and re-written version of Gaiger’s earlier book Aesthetics and Painting (2008) with some supplemental material comprising, along with ten pages on the history of vision with reference to the foundational work of the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, the entirety of the chapter on recent painting. This new chapter is stylistically and conceptually very much of a piece with the rest of the book. Each chapter surveys fundamental issues and debates in its topic, with Gaiger offering his own distinctive views as a advancement on and remedy for the deficiencies of major earlier statements. In contrast to his earlier chapters on various aspects of depiction, art historical concepts, and characteristics of modernism and the avant-garde, the chapter on contemporary painting has something of a digressive quality in serially treating both a range of issues and particular painters. Whereas the earlier chapters rehearse and criticize the views of major thinkers on painting from Alberti in the Renaissance, through the foundational work in art history of Heinrich Wölfflin, and to the recent philosophers Richard Wollheim and Nelson Goodman, Gaiger simply notes that contemporary art has attracted little philosophical consideration. He suggests oddly that “‘surely one of the reasons why few analytic philosophers have ventured to write on’ contemporary art is that “contemporary art is likely to date quickly, serving perhaps as a useful commentary but without lasting significance” (150), without offering any reflection as to why that is, or why reflection on that alleged possibility would itself date quickly.

     Gaiger offers two distinctive potential contributions to the philosophy of contemporary painting: a brief statement of what sort of relevant issues admit of philosophical treatment (151); and an extended consideration of contemporary painting in the service of giving what he calls ‘a non-conservative defence of painting’ (ibid).

One point that admits of philosophical treatment is the concept of the ‘contemporary’ itself with regard to art. Gaiger notes that some thinkers treat contemporary art as a new period distinct from modern art, and his discussions indicate that he agrees. At the beginning of the chapter he writes that “perhaps the most remarkable feature of what has come to be identified as ‘the contemporary’ is that it is no longer bound—even negatively—by the preoccupations of modernism.”  He adds that this break with modernism “is also the marker of a new-found freedom, initially hard won, but now worn with a certain lightness that is itself a testament to the transformation in critical priorities”, and that contemporary painters are aware of this new conception and practice of freedom as “an informed freedom from constraint.” (145) This suggests that the negative freedom, that is, ‘freedom from’ as characterized by Isaiah Berlin, is on Gaiger’s account a kind of master value of contemporary painting. The contemporary painter is first of all free from the burdens of modernist issues, conceptions, and aspirations, in particular the doctrine of ‘medium-specificty’ associated particularly with the art critic Clement Greenberg, a doctrine that claims that the historical course of modernist painting has a structure of progressive clarification of and insistence upon materials and artistic methods distinctive of the art form of painting.  The question immediately arises as to what this negative freedom is in the service of, what are the positive freedoms, the freedoms-to, of contemporary painting: to what does contemporary painting aspire, and what counts as an artistic achievement in this novel art form? To see Gaiger’s answer one turns to his much lengthier effort in response to the second issue of giving a non-conservative defense of contemporary painting.

     As a preliminary to the defense of contemporary painting as a kind of artistic painting, Gaiger has given in the first chapter a characterization of artistic painting generally and of its distinctive kind of meaningfulness. He writes that there are four ‘basic elements needed for an account of painting; the purposive marking of a surface through direct bodily movement to create a visual image,” (9) and then explicates each characteristic by contrasting it with some characteristic of non-artistic painting; (a) ‘purposive marking’ contrasts with naturally occurring shapes and patterns; (b) ‘surface’ contrasts painting with other art forms such as music and architecture; (c) ‘direct bodily movement’ contrasts with mechanical or nature processes; (d) ‘visual image’ “serves to exclude non-artistic forms of painting, such as painting on a wall or a chair where the goal is to protect the object and perhaps to make it more beautiful, but not to create a pattern of marks that has a discernible meaning.” (9-10; the word ‘discernable’ was added to the statement published in the earlier version of the book published as Aesthetics and Painting).

     A problem immediately arises for Gaiger’s account of painting with regard to the intended force of the phrase ‘visual image’. He states explicitly with regard to (d) that the production of a visual image in painting distinguishes artistic from non-artistic painting, but this is surely insufficient to mark the distinction: the street sign, for example, that shows a figure walking is not an instance of painting as an art. In a passage that has no parallel in the earlier version, he seems to agree, as he notes that an advantage of the account of representation he favors, a revised version of Richard Wollheim’s views, is that it “accommodate[s] the full spectrum of depiction—including cases such as looking at advertisements and other demotic images” while also accommodating other “kinds of depiction, predominantly but not exclusively art pictures.” (60) This favored account was given by the philosopher Bence Nanay who argues that in pictorial seeing “[w]e perceptually represent both the depicted object and some properties of the picture surface (while we may or may not attend to them).” (59-60, quoting Nanay (2010) with Gaiger’s italics) But this qualification does not go so far as to clarify Gaiger’s views on the distinction between non-artistic and artistic painting, since he notes that the kind of pictorial perception that attends (and not merely perceptually represents) attention to both the depicted object and surface properties in a painting ranges beyond artistic painting; and in any case the relation between this kind of pictorial awareness and the production of a ‘visual image’ is wholly unclarified.

     Nonetheless, Gaiger does claim as part of his non-conservative defense of contemporary painting that his account of artistic painting accommodates this most recent kind of painting; and so we turn to his full account of contemporary painting . The complex presentation and discussion in the chapter can be divided into three parts: the conception of contemporary painting as exhibiting a novel kind of freedom; the defense of contemporary painting; and the question of the limits of what counts as a painting in contemporary art:

     A. Gaiger begins with the work of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Amy Sillman as examples of contemporary painting exemplifying the ‘informed freedom from constraint’. (145-50) Both “are involved in an ongoing dialogue with earlier forms of art”, but one conducted “on their own terms”: they take what they find valuable in past painting, “but their practice is not determined by opposition to what came before.” Yiadom-Boakye’s figures “are not located in a specific historical moment, but they are identifiably of our own time.” A further feature of Yiadom-Boakye’s works is that they require us to understand individual pieces “in relation to the larger practice of which they form a part.” This is even more true of Sillman’s works, which individually exhibit internal coherence but can also be viewed as stages or moments in the working out of an idea that takes place within and across several works, often heading in multiple directions at once.” Further, Sillman says that her mode of working “refuses to ‘aggrandize’ painting and instead embraces ‘the intimate and discomforting process of things changing as they go awry.’” Gaiger seems to be suggesting that Yiadom-Boakye, Sillman, and their works exemplify informed freedom from constraint above of all in knowing (hence ‘informed’) but dispensing with issues and questions of how to relate one’s work to the past achievements in painting, and knowing but refusing to acknowledge the distinctive features of the medium of painting, whether as traditionally conceived or as conceived in modernist art. His characterizations further suggest that the relevant sense of freedom in contemporary painting involves a freedom from determination, from being one thing or another.

B. Gaiger claims that contemporary painting suffers a ‘legitimation crisis’ in something like the sense that Jürgen Habermas diagnosed liberal capitalist societies suffering in the 1970s. A legitimation crisis involves a decline of confidence in the systems that regulate an area of life. Contemporary painting’s crisis arises largely from “the loss of its earlier position at the vanguard of modern art”, and the resulting sense that engaging “seriously with painting as an art form was to seek to reverse the [artistic] gains made by the upheavals of the 1960s and 70s.” (154) Gaiger considers two aspects of this loss of position: (a) the idea proposed in the late 1970s by the art historian Rosalind Krauss that recent sculpture at least existed within an ‘expanded field’ that included other novel kinds of art including earthworks and installations, and this development put an end to the idea that sculpture is the paradigmatic spatial art; the analogous thought seems to be that painting too is no longer the leading and paradigmatic pictorial art, but rather exists in an expanded field of photographic and digital arts; and further, (b) seemingly the leading contemporary pictorial arts are digital, and “contemporary painting has had to come to terms with the pre-eminence of the digital image” (151). In response there has arisen a conservative defense of painting that stresses painting’s characteristics and typical values of warmth and subjectivity, labor and slowness, close observation, sensitivity to materials, and its combined appeal to vision and touch. (159-60) Gaiger rejects the promotion of these “simplifications that sustain the conservative defence of painting” as failing to engage with the ‘currency’ of the digital image. Instead he proposes that one examine what links painting and digital images in the actual practice of art (his examples are Wade Guyton and Julie Mehretu), while allowing “the transformations wrought by digital technology [to] cast a raking light on the traditional practice of painting, helping to bring out saliencies that might otherwise have been overlooked.” (161) The result is a non-conservative defense of painting; instead of the conservative defense’s appeal to the traditional values of expressive subjectivity and handcraft, the non-conservative defense appeals to paintings’ stabile identity (in contrast to circulating and transforming digital images), and painting’s longevity (in contrast to digital media’s rapid obsolescence). (166)

C. What are the limits of contemporary painting qua painting? Gaiger notes that, in contrast to traditional painting, a great deal of contemporary painting is ‘expanded’ in the sense that it treats artistically not just virtual space and the relation between the virtual image presented and its physical support, but also the actual space within which the painting is shown. This recruitment of actual space into the work gives some contemporary painting quasi-sculptural and site-specific dimensions, as in the colossal and crumpled paintings of Angela de la Cruz. By contrast, Olafur Eliasson’s Green River, which consists of dye poured into rivers, turns out on Gaiger’s account not to be a painting because “it is primarily directed towards our understanding of natural processes” and is not in direct dialogue “with the medium of painting, and its long and complex history.” (169) At the end of the chapter Gaiger considers a particularly challenging work, at least conceptually, by Katharina Grosse, Rockaway, wherein “[o]ver a period of several days, she used a crane and an industrial spray gun to transform a former aquatics building . . . spraying paint not only on the interior walls and ceiling, but also on the exterior of the structure and outwards onto the dunes.” (171) Gaiger asserts that the piece clearly meets the first three of his characteristics of artistic painting—“it is the result of a deliberate or intentional sequence of actions; it involves the marking of a surface, even if that surface is extended through three dimensions and out into the surrounding world; and it is made through bodily movement” (171-72)—but fails to evidently conform to the fourth requirement that it be a visual image. Gaiger immediately interprets this as meaning whether it exhibits ‘virtual pictorial space’ and in particular relations of (virtual) foreground and back; and he asserts that it does not, and so on his definition strictly considered the work fails to be a painting. But he nonetheless concludes that it can rightly be considered painting in an expanded sense because of “the sheer painterliness of Grosse’s use of colour and her refusal to relinquish the most basic constituent of painting as an art: the transformation of a surface by marking it with colours. It is this that has awakened a sense of wonder in the viewer since the earliest times.” (172) This thought leads to the last sentences of the chapter and the book, where Gaiger tentatively concludes that the fourth component of the definition, that is, that the activity of artistic painting produce a visual image “is not essential to painting or, more persuasively, that it needs to be understood in a different way.” Rightly considered, it is not the production of a visual image that marks something as an artistic painting, but rather the transfiguration of something that allows us to see that which is transfigured “as belonging to the world of the mind and not just to the material world.” (173)

    With this complex account, has Gaiger given a plausible defence of contemporary painting? And, more broadly, has he given an account that helps us make sense of the distinctive aims, methods, and products of contemporary artistic painting? It seems to me that his arguments and analyses are too riddled with internal tensions and inconsistencies to be fully persuasive. By way of criticism, I shall address each of his three central concerns, and then suggest a major source of the problems endemic to his account.

A’. It is difficult to attach any determinate sense to Gaiger’s claim that ‘informed freedom from constraint’ is a distinctive feature of contemporary painters and/or painting. What seems important to Gaiger is rather the claim that contemporary painting is not rightly understood as continuous with modernist painting, and, correlatively that contemporary painters are not rightly understood as ‘neo’ anything (“there is nothing ‘neo’ about the return to figuration when it is informed by recognizably contemporary concerns and commitments” (147)), that is, are not rightly understood as re-doing some past style or movement. But this seems false on the face of it: from the fact, if it is one, that some contemporary painter is not rightly characterized as, say, ‘neo-expressionist’, it does not follow that the relevant contemporary painting is not illuminatingly characterized as ‘expressionist’, and that part of what such a characterization means is that aspects of the painting share some stylistic features with works by Beckmann or Kirchner or whoever. Gaiger’s way of stating the claim is so broad that it entails treating contemporary painting as utterly novel and unique, sharing nothing with any of the world’s previous art. Now, it would be a further claim, and one perhaps suggested by some of Gaiger’s remarks, that it is not a feature of contemporary painting that painters knowingly or with self-awareness explore, model themselves on, or otherwise relate themselves to the achievements of past painters, and make such self-awareness part of the content of their work. But, despite Gaiger’s indications, while this might be true of, say, Yiadom-Boakye, it is again surely false with regard to contemporary painting generally.

B’. Gaiger claims that (i) contemporary painting suffers a legitimation crisis; and that (ii) in contrast to digital images and their art, contemporary painting exhibits stability in its products and longevity in its practices, and noting these two characteristics amounts to a non-conservative defense of such painting. But the broad recognition of the seeming fact that painting is not longer widely viewed as the ‘leading’—the most dynamic, innovative, experimental, etc.—art form does not plausibly amount to anything like a ‘legitimation crisis’ in Habermas’s sense; it just means that currently painting is widely viewed as one among many contemporary art forms. The old idea that ‘painting is dead’ was common enough in the 1970s and 1980s, but is not to my knowledge a living topos in contemporary art discourse. And in any case Gaiger’s defense, if successful, does nothing to restore painting to its leading role; it could only serve that ideological aim if he showed that stability and longevity were more central artistic values than whatever values digital art exhibits.

C’. Gaiger argues that appeal to his mode of the four characteristics of artistic painting provides criteria for determining whether some non-traditional contemporary work of art is or isn’t a painting. But as Gaiger himself notes with regard to the work of Katharina Grosse, his fourth characteristic, that paintings exhibit a ‘visual image’, fails to provide the key mark whose presence or absence determines whether something is a painting. He claims rather that the work exhibits ‘painterliness’ and a transformative character that mark it as a painting. But his model, and his discussion throughout the book up until that concluding analysis, do nothing to prepare his judgment, which seems in the context ad hoc and as if arising from a quite different style of thought.

    So none of Gaiger’s central claims and analyses survive unscathed. Where does he go wrong? As my criticisms suggest, it seems to me that a major problem is his reliance upon an inadequate account of painting. It is not just that he leaves the key mark of a ‘visual image’ unanalyzed, and then abandons it in a conceptually unmotivated manner at the moment when it should have been put to work. One might think that a basic problem is the very attempt to give a ‘definition’ of artistic painting in terms of four necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. For what use could such a ‘definition’ be, other than to serve as a police-concept for a museum that claims to show art and only art? Gaiger himself notes two key features of painting and art forms generally that are not well accommodated by such an account. First, there are levels of relative basic-ness, and so relative secondariness, in the characteristics of artistic painting. As Gaiger notes, the transformation of something through color is basic to painting. Second, painting, like all art forms, is a historical phenomenon, and there is no reason at all to think that a simple definition can capture the expansions, contractions, developments, and mutations of what counts as a painting. A more flexible model of an art form would be one that treated the practice—painting, drawing, sculpture, etc.—as exhibiting certain basic features, an ever-shifting and -changing array of secondary and tertiary features, as well as historically varying relations to other arts and indeed other non-artistic practices. It seems to me that Gaiger would do well to abandon the unworkable definition here and devote his prodigious philosophical mind to working out an account that acknowledges his own better insights on the historicity and strata of art forms.

References:

Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ in Four Essays on Liberty (1969)

Jason Gaiger, Aesthetics and Painting (2008)

-----Philosophy of Painting (2022)

Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis

Expression (2005)

Bence Nanay, ‘Inflected and Uninflected Experience of Pictures’ in Philosophical Perspectives on Depiction, ed. Abell and Bantinaki (2010)

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)