Crisis? What Crisis?? Or, What can the philosophy of art criticism contribute to art criticism? Part Two: On the Alleged Problem of So-Called Negative Criticism

     In my previous post I noted that there recently appeared an unusually interesting and intelligent piece on the state of contemporary visual art criticism by Sean Tatol, a 34 year-old critic who has been publishing for a little under four years. His sole venue is an on-line publication called The Manhattan Art Review, and he is its sole writer. Tatol’s piece ‘Negative Criticism’ briefly describes and reflects upon his art criticism, diagnoses basic problems with typical contemporary art criticism, and offers an account of what art criticism rightly considered, and free from its current debilitations, can and should be. In response the art critic Ben Davis has given a set of reflections that partially enthusiastically agree, and partially disagree, with Tatol’s. The most striking aspect of Davis’s response is his rejection of Tatol’s model of what contemporary art criticism should be, and his suggestion of an alternative. Here I’ll first summarize Tatol’s and Davis’s accounts while briefly commenting, and then place them within the field of concerns articulated in the post-World War II Anglophone philosophy of art criticism. In my next post I’ll introduce criticisms of both accounts, suggest a further model that incorporates elements that survive the criticisms from both authors, and try to indicate ways in which the third model fits pieces of art criticism I especially admire.

     Since shortly after he began publishing The Manhattan Art Review, Tatol’s criticism has largely, though by no means exclusively, been part of a section he calls ‘Kritics Korner’ wherein Tatol gives short reviews of as many as ten exhibitions. The reviews range in length from about two full paragraphs to a few sentences, with most towards the shorter end of the spectrum. Additionally, each exhibition is given a rating of from 1 to 5 stars, often nuanced with a ‘.5’; so a ‘3.5’ rating indicates something better than the mediocrity of a ‘3’ but insufficiently achieved to merit the sign of rating of thorough-going goodness, though not greatness, which is a ‘4’. Tatol’s rating system is loosely modeled upon that of the music critic Robert Christgau, who used the scholastic F through A system, which permits an even more nuanced rating with its pluses and minuses, and so could allow an even more secure sense of relative quality and so better determine which album by Bruce Springsteen or Bananarama to buy with one’s allowance. Davis and others assure us that these short pieces have been a ‘hit’ in that they have been widely ‘shared’ and discussed, and not just by art aficionados in New York City, and Davis unqualifiedly considers such discussion a virtue.

    The rating system, so Tatol asserts, immediately introduces a ‘judgment’. What sort of judgment? Tatol says that it involves a judgment of ‘quality’ and with it, one must think, a sense of relative quality. That is, the endpoints of the numerical spectrum are the abominably bad (a ‘1’) and the superlatively good (a ‘5’), and so a ‘3.5’ is better than a ‘3’ and worse than a ‘4’. But what is the point of giving a numerical rating? As Tatol notes, it cannot be closely analogous to Christgau’s advice to a consumer to buy or not buy something, as the rarity and expense of an artwork in a Manhattan gallery or museum are incomparably greater than a copy of Frampton Comes Alive. One predictable effect of such rating would be to encourage or discourage gallery visits; if I trusted the seriousness and taste of the art critic, her rating one show a ‘4’ might get me on the ‘A’ train to Chelsea, whereas a ‘1.5’ rating would keep me at home listening to ‘Do You Feel Like I Do?’. But perhaps more importantly, a rating might provide a first-time viewer of an exhibition with something analogous to a statement of what the show is ‘about’. That is, just as the viewer might be aided by a critic’s claim that the show is ‘about’ X, and so keep X in mind as she views and reflects upon the works; so the viewer might keep in mind the show’s rating, and search for the kinds of goodness or badness the rating indicates.

     In any case, for Tatol what immediately arises with the use of numerical ratings is the specter of ‘negative criticism’; anything below a ‘4’ is characterized as mediocre, boring, flawed in parts, or worse. Tatol thinks that any negative criticism offends against a contemporary ideology that he calls ‘subjective universalism’, whose motto is given in the meme ‘let people enjoy themselves’. It is perhaps too much to call subjective universalism an ideology, as from Tatol’s description it seems like little more than a small set of self-satisfied, defensive, and reductivist prejudices, a tight cluster of neurotic symptoms. Any negative criticism of anything threatens to spoil people’s enjoyment of their cultural activities; negative criticism insinuates the existence of other and better cultural worlds; and the typical enjoyments of contemporary people are familiar, easy, and/or popular, and so ‘guilty’ in that there is no aspirational dimension to the pleasure. (But if something like this is generally true, who’s feeling ‘guilty’?)

     The alternative to this subjective universalism, Tatol thinks, arise from reflection upon the aim of criticism, which is ‘education’. But surprisingly he explicates this not in terms of the audience’s, but rather in terms of his own, education. He says that he’s learned more about visual art in the few years of writing criticism than he knew when he began writing. He describes his own passage from youthful tastes to a more mature taste through wide reading, particularly from consulting ‘best of’ lists and following up their suggestions. But, again surprisingly, he acknowledges that such lists cannot plausibly be thought to present the results of the application of ‘objective’ standards; rather, as with Christgau’s lists, they ‘crystallize the critic’s sensibility.” And surprisingly for a third time, what is particularly valuable about the critic and her sensibility is its ‘consistency’, and not, say, its rightness or accuracy or learnedness or penetration.

    After flailing contemporary art critics, in particular the New York Times’s Holland Cotter, for writing approvingly and uncritically of artworks that seem to embody some fashionable ‘social justice’-type attitudes, Tatol concludes with a final surprising move: he takes what he calls a ‘quasi-theological’ turn in asserting that what makes an artwork good is that and how it enacts “a channeling of an external sense of life into an artwork”; and “good criticism seeks to recognize this good as much as it can.” Tatol fails to discuss whether ‘external senses of life’ are, as far as equal as far as art is concerned: Does it matter whether the sense of life is profound or trivial, clairvoyant and or self-deluded, compassionate or vicious? And it is not clear to me how this is consistent with his earlier statement that art critics rightly understood are guardians of quality and judgers. Then one wonders: how does the use of a numerical rating to the critic’s, and by extension the audience’s, recognition of the good?

     So Tatol’s piece presents four concerns, which I shall wrench into the form of claims: 1. His practice of using numerical rankings in art criticism is defensible, in that it re-introduces and highlights ‘negative criticism’, which supports the art critic’s proper mission of defending ‘qualify’ and offering judgments. 2. ‘Negative criticism’ is typically blocked in contemporary art criticism on account of the widespread adoption of the ideology of ‘universal subjectivism’. 3. The aim of art criticism properly understood is education. 4. The ideal art critic is in her criticism instigating and embodying a kind of self-education whose terminus is intellectual (or cultural?) maturity. Ben Davis’s response is a string of loosely connected ruminations on one or another of Tatol’s points. As noted above, Davis generally expresses an enthusiasm for the effect of Tatol’s art criticism, which is that its high volume of weekly batches of short reviews and ratings has ‘got people talking’ about exhibitions that otherwise would not have been reviewed, and further that part of this talk is induced by Tatol’s re-introduction of negative criticism, which stimulates agreement and disagreement from readers. Davis nonetheless disagrees with Tatol’s emphasis on judgment, and seems to suggest that a chief task, or at least virtue, of contemporary art criticism is the critic trying to make sense of (and not necessarily judge or evaluate) novel kinds of expressiveness. Davis further seems to endorse claims 3 and 4, but strongly disagrees with Tatol’s characterization of maturity in claim 4. Davis takes Tatol’s characterization of the idea critic as exhibiting consistency in her criticism to mean that the critic’s views and tastes should be fixed and unvarying (unsurprisingly, Davis offers no textual evidence for this, and it flies in the face of what Tatol says about the critic’s self-education; taken more charitably, ‘consistency’ for Tatol must mean something like a kind of consistency in the exercise of interpretive virtues such as charity and seriousness). Davis accordingly thinks that Tatol’s conception of maturity involves a kind of faithfulness or responsibility to oneself; to this Davis counterpoises maturity as responsibility towards others, and bound to a sense that others, not so much one’s readers as the communities out of which new kinds of artistic expressiveness emerge. On Davis’s conception intellectual “maturity” [Davis’s scare quotes] involves Tatol’s sense but is “also about knowing yourself in relationship to others.” So in criticism one should have, to use Max Weber’s famous terminology, not (just) an ethic of conviction, but rather (also) an ethic of responsibility. A basic impulse in contemporary art criticism is and ought to be finding out about others, and thus the most central virtue of contemporary art criticism then is curiosity, curiosity about others’ artifacts and lives.

     Davis’s insistence that curiosity is something like the cardinal virtue of contemporary art criticism seems to be of a piece with three other criticisms of Tatol. First, Davis dismisses Tatol’s insistence on the importance of judgment or evaluation. Judgment, according to Davis, “is not actually the hard part”, which seems to suggest that for him what is the hard (and more valuable) part is achieving and conveying some understanding of unprecedented artworks. Second, when Davis criticizes what he views as an unsuccessful review by Tatol, he says that it “doesn’t reflect what the works look like or what they are trying to do.” So the harder part of criticism seems to be descriptive and interpretive, that is, conveying a sense of the works’ appearance, the artist’s aim, and how the former partially fulfills the latter. Finally, Davis suggests that Tatol misses the central reason for the current poor quality of art criticism, which he says is the ‘degeneration of the media environment’ into something that demands a ‘quick take’ on things, which presumably includes Tatol’s weekly batch of short, numerical reviews. The exercise of curiosity is demanding and time-consuming: “It definitely takes time to do the work of thinking about each show as an individual thing, to find out enough to check your preconceptions and do justice to the work, either positively or negatively. It takes time to do the actual writing.”

     I’ll conclude this post with a sketch of how to place Tatol’s and Davis’s accounts within the schema and concerns provided by canonical bits of the philosophy of art criticism. Recall that Isenberg had offered a model of the core act of art criticism as involving three conceptually distinct and mutually reinforcing moments: V (verdict) + R (reason) + N (norm). And Beardsley claimed that there are two distinct models of the critic’s activity, CU (the consumer union which carries the constitutive aim of art criticism as a kind of evaluative guide for recipients) and PA (the press agent who carries the important though non-constitutive aim of supporting and endorsing artists’ works).  For Tatol the act of criticism is consummated in V, while R is minimal, or even occasionally non-existent. He seems to think that N is fixed is for any given critic at any particular time, but that the critic must also understand that N develops over time as the critic’s sensibility matures. Davis in marked contrast considers V easy and typically routine, while the action is in the struggle to produce R and establish a kind of local determinacy and validity for N. Once R and N are established, V either follows trivially or is otiose. With regard to Beardsley’s models, Tatol ignores PA and offers an idiosyncratic version of CU, in that the recipient remains unconceptualized and amorphous, and the focus instead is on whether and how a piece of art criticism might contribute to the critic’s maturation. Davis likewise ignores the audience, and counters Tatol with a strong version of PA, with the proviso that the artist for whom the critic advocates is not something or someone given in advance of criticism, but rather something one arrives at through a long process of looking, investigation, and reflection. For Davis N is already there prior to criticism, which must be fundamentally conceptualized as the revelation and clarification of N. Davis’s appeal to ‘pluralism’ turns into the claim that there are multiple N’s, each of which has as it were a regional validity where it governs the interpretation and evaluation of works from its district, but whose scope is strictly limited.

     It seems to me that this brief placing of Tatol’s and Davis’s accounts is illuminating, at the very least of helping clarify why one might think they are talking past each other. Is there then nothing more to say than to note that they agree on some points and sharply disagree on others? In my next post I’ll try to advance philosophical reflection on these accounts with an appeal to the distinction between theoretical and practical reason, and a re-formulation of the point of art criticism as not primarily to produce evaluations or interpretations, but rather to bring the reader to see why the art is worth viewing. I’ll then try to show how this model fits the practice of some of the great critics across the arts.

 References:

Monroe Beardsley, ‘What are Critics For?’ (1978), in The Aesthetic Point of View: Selected Essays (1982)

Ben Davis, ‘Negative Reviews? Part 1 & 2’ in Artnet (2023)

Arnold Isenberg, ‘Critical Communication’ (1948), in Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism (1973)

Sean Tatol, ‘Negative Criticism’ in The Point (2023)

Max Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’ (1919)

Crisis? What Crisis? Or, What can the philosophy of art criticism contribute to art criticism?--Part One

     About 45 years ago I developed a strong interest in contemporary art in the San Francisco Bay Area. A major expression of this interest was of course going to lots of shows of recent art in galleries. For the most part museums did not show contemporary art, although the old San Francisco Museum of Modern Art regularly had exhibitions of living artists; it was there that I saw for example the last show of Philip Guston that opened when he was alive. The Berkeley Art Museum’s so-called Matrix shows likewise presented contemporary art, and focused not on venerable figures like Guston but on up-and-comers; so it was there that I first saw works by a great many contemporary artists including Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Additionally an interest in contemporary art expressed itself in reading a great deal of art criticism, that is, reviews of temporary exhibitions of works by (for the most part) living artists. At first I read a California publication called Artweek, and then expanded to the national publications Art in America, Artforum, and Arts magazine (this last one struck me as superior to the other three, although a particular critic might publish in more than one). Throughout the 1980s I found much of this reading at the very least informative, and occasionally helpful in understanding particularly odd works (What did Bruce Nauman mean by hanging up all those plastic animals?), but it never occurred to me to imagine that this body of writing offered any authoritative guide to taste or the understanding of the arts. Nor did I look for guidance from the artists and art enthusiasts I knew, as I found their judgments manifestly biased by personal relations of friend-or-foe, as well as a kind of taboo against negative remarks about emergent art forms like video and installation art. For such guides I looked to the great art writers of the past—Baudelaire on the Salons, Walter Pater on the Renaissance, Proust on Chardin, Michel Butor on Monet and Mondrian--, certain art historians—especially Meyer Schapiro and Leo Steinberg--, and some philosophers of art—especially Aristotle, Kant, John Dewey, R. G. Collingwood, and Richard Wollheim--, although again it never occurred to me to treat some judgment about older art as unqualifiedly right because it came from one of these great figures.  By 1990 it seemed to me that I had sufficient knowledge and understanding of at least the contemporary visual arts to write my own art criticism, and so I began publishing in Artweek.

     Along the way I’ve encountered various evaluative remarks about art criticism, remarks that evidently do not form a consistent set of views. So one remark is that, at least on some occasions or with regard to certain art forms or particular artists, such-and-such a critic is ‘too negative’. So the San Francisco Chronicle’s long-time critic Kenneth Baker was said to be ‘too negative’ about photography. Around the year 2000 I was on a panel on improvisation sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Art Practice Department. I tried to give a summary account of the characteristic virtues of improvisation, and then cited and discussed some criticisms of improvisation from John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Anthony Braxton, and Theodor Adorno. The other panelists’ brows knit as I introduced criticisms, and my fellow panelist Mary Lovelace O’Neal, the chair of the department, immediately denounced me as a typical art critic and theorist who didn’t understand the artistic process and so made pointless and unfounded ‘negative’ remarks about art.

     But at least this century, it seems rather more common to criticize art criticism as ‘too positive’ and/or culpably lacking negative criticism. About twenty years ago in two separate publications the art historian James Elkins and the art critic Raphael Rubenstein lamented the loss of ‘judgment’ in recent art criticism, whereby they seemed to mean ‘negative judgments’ claiming that the works discussed were artistic failures, and perhaps also ethical or political or spiritual failures. And just in the past months there have been publications from two of the finest American art critics now active, Sean Tatol and Ben Davis, raising the issue of the seeming current lack of ‘negative’ art criticism and suggesting diagnoses and remedies. Tatol’s and Davis’s pieces strike me as thoughtful, informed, and so eminently worth reading for anyone interested in the state of current American art criticism. I was a bit surprised by the prominence in both cases of what are for all the world philosophical issues about evaluation and explanation; consequently I began wondering whether the philosophy of art criticism, and particularly a small number of writings that count as its recent canonical texts, might throw some light on Tatol’s and Davis’s remarks, and further on contemporary art criticism generally. By way of introduction, I’ll very briefly summarize the course of debates and introduce the key concepts in the field since World War II, and then in my next post try to apply some of them to the most recent discussion.

     A great deal of discussion in Anglophone philosophy of art criticism is oriented towards ideas, analyses, and issues in a piece derived from a lecture in 1948 by the philosopher Arnold Isenberg, published as ‘Critical Communication’. I’ll paraphrase and partially elaborate the account, while relieving it of some dated emotivist formulations: Isenberg suggested that a typical conceptual core of art criticism consisted of a three-part claim (Isenberg, pp. 155-56) The first part was a judgment or evaluation of the work(s) discussed, called ‘V’ (for Verdict or value judgment). The second part offered some description of the relevant work(s) that functioned to (at least partially) justify the verdict; this is called ‘R’ (for Reason). Thirdly, there is an invocation of some (set of) standards, criteria, or norms in light of which V + R claims some non-idiosyncratic authority; this is called ‘N’ (for Norm). The critic offers, explicitly or implicitly, some inductive reasoning for choosing the relevant N, and N is presented as if ‘backing up’ V + R (p. 158) One immediate consequence of this analysis is that a purported instance of art criticism that lacks a judgment or evaluation is not really art criticism at all. So on Isenberg’s account, if a purported piece of art criticism lacks an evaluative judgment and restricts itself to, say, explanation, interpretation, and/or description, it limits itself to at most explaining, but not justifying a critical evaluation; such a piece of language is not a critical communication (and so not an instance of art criticism proper), but rather an ordinary communication (pp. 164-5). I pass over much of this great essay, most of which argues for the claim that critical communication takes place between two parties, both of which are in the perceptual presence of what is being discussed (on this point see also Baxandall (1985)).

     A second canonical bit of analysis came in a series of essays by Monroe Beardsley in his essay ‘What are Critics For?’ Beardsley suggests that there are two major models for art criticism, each of which is accompanied by distinctive conceptions of the purpose and primary content of criticism. (He mentions and dismisses without explication a third model, the ‘judicial’ model, as ‘dead’ (Beardsley, pp. 159-60)) The first model, which Beardsley thinks captures much of the activity of art criticism, both in actuality and rightly considered, is the “Consumers’ Union model of (professional) criticism”, of ‘CU’ for short (p. 150) Beardsley says that on this model “the critic’s primary obligation is to the consumer of art—the audience, the viewer, the reader, the listener . . . [the critic] tells us, as best he (sic) can, what we need to know to make intelligent choices about works of art” (ibid). So such an art critic does engage in an evaluative activity—they tell you, for example, that one bank building is better than another as a work of architecture (that is, I take it, as an instance of artistic building)--, but do not make your (ultimate) decisions for you, as those further depend upon your particular circumstances of what morality you hold, how much money you have, what you consider safe and healthy, etc. Beardsley considers a number of prima facie objections to this model, two of which seem to me particularly relevant to the practices of contemporary art criticism. One objection is that in CU the critic offers no interpretation of the artwork; but surely it is part of the critic’s role to help, if not enable, receivers of artworks to interpret them correctly (p. 152) Second, Beardsley notes that there are difficulties for criticism arising “from the nature of certain avant-garde developments” (p. 153), including the sense that anything like traditional judgments of quality miss the point of the artistic activity (Beardsley cites John Cage’s 4’33”), or even that conceptualist gestures, while allegedly creating an artwork, offer no object upon which to fix one’s gaze or to interpret.

      For Beardsley the other major model of art criticism is “the press agent (or PA) model of criticism” (p. 155). On this model “the critic’s primary obligation is not to the consumer, but to the producer—that is, to the artist and, indirectly, to the art itself as a form of enterprise involving many artists, present and future.” The critic does not judge, but rather their “central tasks are analysis and exegesis” that aim to help us “see the underlying structure and texture of the artwork” and “help clear up our puzzlement about the meaning or meanings of the work” (ibid). Whereas ideal critics on the CU model are competent judges, on the PA model they are competent interpreters. Beardsley goes on to urge that the CU and PA models are substantially consistent; their sole substantive difference is that the former demands, and the latter refrains from, judgment. Beardsley claims that CU with its judgments captures the primary character of art criticism, while PA “calls attention to important but secondary roles” of the critic (p. 156). CU also helps us grasp and articulate certain characteristic failures in art criticism. The critic may error in discussing trivial or irrelevant matters that divert attention from judgment; critics may stick with the PA model of (mere) interpretation and explanation and so be derelict in their central duty; and they may dogmatically offer judgments without reasons for the judgments (pp. 161-63). Such failures are not infrequent, and the CU model helps one spot them and provides a way of reminding the critic of their proper task (p. 164).

      There are of course many more considerations, insights, and arguments available in the Anglophone philosophy of art criticism. Perhaps most relevant to these sketches of some of Isenberg’s and Beardsley’s points are counter-arguments to the claim that judgment or evaluation is central or even indispensable to art criticism proper. Arthur Danto, for example, argued that under contemporary conditions that critics ought to refrain from judgment and limit themselves to explicating the ideas embodied in art works and analyzing the ways in which artists in fact managed to embody those ideas (see Danto 2005). More recently James Grant has argued that although evaluation and judgment are prominent aspects of much art criticism, what he calls the constitutive goal of art criticism is to present the features of artworks that are rightly appreciated, and that the non-constitutive goal which occupies much of actual art criticism is to provide imaginative ways of helping the reader grasp what and how to appreciate. Still, I would think that anyone familiar with recent discussions of art criticism will sense how much of Isenberg’s and Beardsley’s points resonate with typical contemporary concerns and complaints. So in my next post I turn to Tatol’s and Davis’s recent pieces, and will attempt to explicate and interpret their various claims in light of these conceptual resources from the philosophy of art criticism.

References:

Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: on the historical explanation of pictures (1985)

Monroe Beardsley, ‘What are Critics For?’ (1978), in The Aesthetic Point of View: Selected Essays (1982)

Arthur Danto, ‘The Fly in the Fly Bottle: The Explanation and Critical Judgment of Works of Art’, in Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life (2005)

Ben Davis, ‘Negative Reviews? Part 1 & 2’ in Artnet (2023)

James Elkins, What Happened to Art Criticism? (2003)

James Grant, The Critical Imagination (2013)

Arnold Isenberg, ‘Critical Communication’ (1948), in Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism (1973)

Raphael Rubenstein, ‘Why Don’t Critics Make Judgments Anymore?’ in Art in America (2003)

Sean Tatol, ‘Negative Criticism’ in The Point (2023)

Why are Frank Bowling’s Horizontal Paintings better than his Vertical Ones?

     For me one of the outstanding artistic discoveries of the past five or so years has been the work of the octogenarian painter Frank Bowling. I first became aware of Bowling, at least as more than a name, and his work through posts on Facebook by the Engish art critic Matthew Collings. Bowling had taught Collings in art school; and it seemed as if Bowling, who long maintained studios in both London and New York City, was much more prominent in England that elsewhere. Then Bowling had a major retrospective in Germany in 2017, and the reproductions in that exhibition’s catalog gave the strong impression of a major artist. A few years ago the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art acquired Bowling’s large, horizontally formatted abstract painting ‘Elder Sun Benjamin’ (2018), a rare spirit-lifting event and subsequent oasis in the artistic desert of the Bay Area artworld. Most recently the SFMOMA hosted a large exhibition of Bowling’s works, largely from 1965-75, together with a few more recent paintings and some works by artist contemporaries and mentors who were important to Bowling. This show seemed to confirm my sense that Bowling is the greatest living abstract painter, or at least the greatest known to me. But each viewing of the show left a peculiar and puzzling impression: Why is it that Bowling’s paintings in a horizontal format, especially very large abstract works organized in a few broad bands of color, almost invariably seemed more interesting and engaging than those in a vertical format, whether abstract or containing one or more of the maps of continents that were the focus of the show?

     Along with the greatly increased exhibition of Bowling’s art internationally in the past decade, there has been an accompanying efflorescence of writing on Bowling in monographs and catalog essays. The emphases of this literature are unsurprising—the issues surrounding a Black Guyanese painter finding his way in London and New York City--, while equally unsurprising (at least to me) is the near-complete neglect of Bowling’s own published writings that are not directly relevant to his ethnicity and country of origin. Bowling has repeatedly stated that an early reading of the philosopher of art Richard Wollheim’s essay ‘On Expression and Expressionism’, published in 1964, was and is the touchstone of his artistic thinking. This point is unmentioned in what seem to be the most widely read, or at least cited, pieces on Bowling, those of German retrospective’s curator Okwui Enwezor and some pieces by the cultural theorist and critic Kobena Mercer. It is likewise no surprise that no published consideration has been given to the question of (possibly) varying quality in Bowling’s work.

     In a zoom lecture of 2021, ‘Expression in Contemporary Art’ I sketched an account of Bowling’s artistic practice, and suggested what roles Wollheim’s essay might have played in Bowling’s thought. That essay was the first of several major writings by Wollheim on artistic expression published over three decades. In that first attempt Wollheim was concerned to stress two negative points about expressiveness in the visual arts: First, that there is no secure, context-unspecific route from the character of a mark to the kinds of expression it embodies or evokes. This strikes at the root of a range of artistic ideologies associated with Abstract Expressionism, where for example one might be tempted to infer from an ‘agitated’ mark to an ‘agitated’ state of mind of the mark-maker. Second, that there is no context-free set of rules or norms or procedures that can reliably produce any particular kind of expressiveness: broad strokes do not necessarily evoke broad thoughts. Although Bowling is reticent in describing how he understood and appropriated Wollheim’s essay, it is irresistible to think that the first claim broke any allegiance to Abstract Expressionist ideologies, and the second rendered incredible any thought that there was one particular route towards whatever kinds of expressiveness the artist wished to achieve.

     If Bowling took something like these thoughts from Wollheim’s essay, it becomes intelligible how he might wish to continue to use both vertical and horizontal formats: neither format carries any determinate kind of expressiveness, and the sustained searching quality of Bowling’s oeuvre, the never-satisfied search for yet more materials that bear the sense of fecundity and possibilities of transformation is is a constant in Bowling’s work across the past half century. But this only intensifies the problem: what of my impression of the consistently richer and more successful expressiveness in Bowling’s abstract paintings of the horizontal format? To help make sense of this, I’ll consider two works c. 1970 in the exhibition: the vertically formatted ‘Night Journey’ (1969-70), a chromatically rich acrylic containing maps of Africa and Central and South America; and the horiztonal ‘Looking at Barney & Mark’ (1972), a large painting of roughly three horizontal bands, the lowest an orange-red then topped by two chromatically similar blue bands, and evoking something of a landscape, especially as the two blue bands are separated by a relatively narrow cloud-like band of dull whites and greys.

     ‘Night Journey’ is the more immediately appealing of the two, as it offers a spectacular though wholly instance of Bowling’s way with primary and secondary colors. The canvas is largely stained with an atmospheric wash of dark reds, which burst in the upper left into a brilliant pinkish red, like the crown of a cumulus cloud irradiated by a setting sun. Bowling has lain a vertical swath of blue on the right side, which obscures some of the red underlayment while repeating in a more confined and restrained way the drama of red. The left side shows the map of Central and South America, dark and partially haloed with an aureole of grayish-blue. The right side displays the map of Africa, likewise dark but an overlay of blue and a horizontal deposit of red pigment rendered as if blown through a small tube. But the key structural element, one that makes it natural to speak individually of the painting’s left and right sides, is a rough vertical plane of yellow, seeming to emerge from a pale greenish ground, and again exhibiting something of the red’s and blue’s efflorescence into pure color. What more could one want?

      The description so far ignores a feature that is invisible in reproduction, but massively determining in actuality: I mean scale. It is not enough to be told that Bowling’s works are large—‘Night Journey’ is roughly 7 feet by 6 feet. It is perhaps irresistible but too easy to characterize this as ‘monumental’, for what is the vertical format roughly bisected, and so invoking relations of symmetry, metaphorizes is the surely the human body. Despite the size, the painting seems instantly grasped as a gestalt, and something with clear, impermeable boundaries, bilateral symmetry, and a dynamic, internally differentiated richness. One of Bowling’s basic painterly mechanisms is echoing the edge’s of the canvas with narrow bands, in many cases with colors and markings that seem alien to the styles and rhythms of much of the canvas. In ‘Night Journey’ the bands of red along the bottom edge, differentiated left and right as light to dark, seem to have been spilled up against and so are contained by the edge of the canvas; they serve only to reinforce the sense of the surface’s rigid boundedness.

     Contrast these effects with those of ‘Looking at Barney & Mark’. Keeping the upper two bands closely similar induces the operation of what seems to me Bowling’s most basic artistic mechanism, the play of boundaries in a relatively unbounded field. So here one looks and reflects and looks: Are there two or three bands? Does the lower red band ‘balance’ the upper two? Are the upper two bands abstractions of the sky, or is it sky and water? Is the lower band a thing of warmth from the smudged iciness of the sky, or is it something rather scalding whose effects are relieved by the cooler blues? And on and on. Bowling here eschews the somewhat forced drama of ‘Night Journey’’s efflorescences in favor of the more closely valued continuity and mild contrast between the relatively, but only relatively, darker blue of the middle band and the lighter blue of the upper. Then consider the edges: the long horizontal format (roughly 5.5 by 9.5 feet) makes it impossible to keep the painting as a whole in sight from any normal viewing distance, and so the sense in the vertical formats of a bounded gestalt does not arise. At the bottom right corner, some of the upper bands’ blue has stained a triangular pool that seems to extend far beyond the physical edge of the canvas. Searching for elements that rhyme with this play of edging, one notices that the middle blue flows to the edge, while the lighter upper blue seems to be in the process of being repelled and collecting itself into a more bounded pool or cloud. Perhaps the upper band is more a whitish-grey solid cloud across which a blue pool drifts? And finally there’s the non-pictorial element of Bowling’s stenciled name in the upper left, reversed as if to indicate the play of order and perhaps to insinuate a mechanism of the bands attached to horizontal, so-called ‘piano’ hinges, as if the canvas could be folded in and out. The maker names himself, and plays with his name as with the painting’s broad structural elements.

     In his Mellon lectures on abstract art, published as Paths to the Absolute, the art historian John Golding notes two striking features shared by major 20th century artists including Mondrian, Malevich, and Kandinsky. Where such artists begin as figurative painters and move to abstraction, one can see across their artistic trajectory that their abstract works emerge as if from the imagined viewpoint of the artist-viewer of their figurative works having ‘moved up’ (Golding, p. 14) to a figurative work until the pictorial elements carrying the recognizability of the figure lose their role in representation, and gain heightened non-semantic qualities of rhythm, color, and texture. Golding further notes that such artists begin with either portrayals of human figures or of landscapes, and not still-lifes (pp. 19-20). Golding suggests that still-life didn’t carry a charge of symbolic meanings and resonances transferred into the resulting abstract paintings sufficient to sustain aesthetic interest. Bowling was never strictly a figurative painter nor a landscape painter; his early work was rather collage-like in combining both figurative and abstract elements. This earlier work thereby insists on a relatively heightened temporality of looking, as the viewer considers part-to-part relations grouped through small-scale projections. If something like the contrast I’ve drawn between Bowling’s later vertical and horizontal formats is right, then the former might be thought to inherit the symbolism and the resonances of figurative portrayal, and the latter of landscape. But only the latter, the abstracts plainly evoking landscapes, carry over Bowling’s concern with the duration of looking populated by framing and re-framing. Likewise these artistic mechanisms more distinctive of the horizontal than the vertical format seem more of a piece with the negative directives Bowling would have drawn from Wollheim’s essay, directives which incorporated into Bowling’s theory of his artistic practice would have charged him with the task of introducing order and hierarchy while simultaneously maintaining the constant sense of their reversibility and undoing.

      So if something like these suggestions and interpretive points are right, then the general superiority of Bowling’s horizontal paintings is intelligible, indeed predictable, as they give fuller play to Bowling’s imagination and interests, and the artistic mechanisms that articulate them.

References:

Okwui Enwezor and others, Frank Bowling: Mappa Mundi (2017)

John Golding, Paths to the Absolute (2000)

Mel Gooding, Frank Bowling (2021)

Kobena Mercer, ‘Atlantic Errancy’ in Frank Bowling’s Americas: New York, 1966-75 (2022), Reto Thüring  and Akili Tommasino with Debra Lennard

John Rapko, ‘Expression in Contemporary Art’ (2021), pdf of images on academia.edu

Richard Wollheim, ‘On Expression and Expressionism’ (1964)

A Partial Review of and Remarks on Edward Winters’s Architectural Aesthetics:

     For much of the half-century after World War II, the philosophy of art in English took music, the visual art of painting, and the verbal arts of fiction and poetry as its focal topics. The prominence of these foci is plausibly construed as part of the inheritance of the so-called ‘system of the fine arts’, a construction influentially characterized by the history Paul O. Kristeller as emergent in Europe at the end of the 18th century which divided the arts into the ‘fine’ and the ‘mechanical’ or ‘applied’, with poetry, sculpture, music, painting among the former, and embroidery, ceramics, landscape gardening and much else among the latter. With the emergence of ballet in the early 19th century, dance was included among the fine arts. What made an form of art into a fine art was never clear, and historically successive attempts at clarification were unsuccessful. Architecture was problematic; in some formulations it was a fine art, in others a mechanical art because it constitutively included reference to particular functions and uses, such as providing shelter or housing a bank. The system of the fine arts is fortunately a thing of the past, and recent writing is dominated by accounts of such things as street art, computer art, comics, etc; but the shadow of the concept of fine art lingers in seemingly intractable difficulties in conceptualizing the relationship between artistic practices and the needs, interests, desires, uses, and functions to which they answer.

     The one recent monument in the philosophy of architecture in English is surely Roger Scruton’s The Aesthetics of Architecture, and there have been significant contributions from a few other authors including Karsten Harries, Edward Winters, and Gordon Graham. The new publication of a book by Winters offers a chance to consider the state of philosophical reflection upon architecture as an art form.

     Winters’s short book ranges widely, and includes historical material, some polemics against the work and thought of the architect Peter Eisenman, and an account of some time spent drinking beer in a bar in Paris. Nonetheless, the core argument is not difficult to state, as it consists of a short series of interconnected claims. Winters claims the following: 1. Architecture is a fine art. 1a. Although most fine arts exhibit what Kant calls ‘pure beauty’ (a beauty undetermined by concepts), architecture exhibits ‘dependent beauty’ (a beauty determined and constrained by at least one concept, in the case of architecture the concept of function or use). 2. A fine art is a practice that regularly produces works that merit aesthetic appreciation. 3. A fine art is a practice that possesses what Winters, following Dominic Lopes, calls a ‘medium-profile’. 3a. A ‘medium-profile’ consists of procedures for technically transforming materials so that the resultant artifact communicates a distinctive kind of meaningfulness, namely what Kant called ‘aesthetic ideas’ (characterized by Winters as “a presentation that cannot be formulated using concepts of cognition, or else we could exhaustively spell out the meaning of a work and its beauty would evaporate” (pp. 117-18)).

     Evidently Winters’s account is markedly traditional, as a great deal of it agrees with and indeed simply re-states Kant’s undeveloped points scattered about the first half of the Critique of Judgment. His use of Lopes’s so-called ‘buck passing’ account of art (wherewith Lopes claims that philosophical attention to the concept of art per se is fruitless, and that philosophical attention is more appropriately directed to the individual arts and their distinctive media-profiles) only reinforces Kant’s prior characterization of architecture as a fine art of adherent beauty without offering any further conceptual materials relevant to analyzing and understanding individual art forms. So as far as I can tell, Winters in effect attempts to up-date Kant’s views in only two aspects: (a) he claims that the materials which are transformed in the artistic practice of architecture are fundamentally of a piece with those of ‘dwelling’ in Heidegger’s sense; (b) Winters claims that the way in which artistic works of architecture acquire aesthetic ideas, and so artistic meaning, can be understood on analogy with the way in which on Richard Wollheim’s account artistic paintings acquire meaning. I’ll comment on these two points, and then offer a couple of concluding thoughts:

     Dwelling: A number of architectural theorists, including penetrating writers of recent decades like Karsten Harries and Christian Norberg-Schulz, have looked to the conception of dwelling in the later work of Martin Heidegger as a guide to thinking about the fundamental needs, norms, and kinds of meaningfulness native to architecture. Winters makes no reference to these earlier discussions, and contents himself with some brief indications. First, in the essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ Heidegger raised two questions with regard to dwelling: what is it, and what is the relationship between dwelling and building. Winters then paraphrases Heidegger as claiming that ‘to dwell’ means “‘to live well’ or ‘to flourish’ or ‘to be’. And this ‘being’ is connected to building.” (p. 18) Oddly, Winters fails to note the Aristotelean resonances of this formulation, and moves immediately to the thought that “building belongs to dwelling by way of our habitation of the world, more specifically our world.” (ibid) He summarizes Heidegger’s account with the single sentence “Dwelling relates us to the world in such a way as to operate within it as participants.” Then, as if continuing the explication of Heidegger’s account, Winters offers a lengthy quote from Heidegger’s slightly later essay ‘The Thing’ that attempts to read off the significance of a clay jug, otherwise unspecified, as exhibiting ‘the four-fold’, a prominent bit of later Heideggerian poetry (or hokum, depending upon one’s taste) that urges the thought that certain ways of making, building, and living embody distinctive conceptions of the relationship both between the earth and the sky and between human beings and gods or immortals. Unsurprisingly, the concept of the four-fold has elicited a great deal of interpretation; surprisingly, Winters leaves it unexplicated and abandons it as soon as he has introduced it.

     From very brief indications scattered later in the book, it seems that what Winters wants from this scamper through the later fields of Heidegger is the thought that there are ‘needs’ bound to the practice of building, and that architecture is a cultural elaboration of (the need for) dwelling: “We might say that ‘dwelling’ has developed into a cultural practice. The art of architecture has arisen out of our fastening critical aesthetic projections onto the ‘lived world’ in which we (naturally?) [Winters’s parenthesis and italics] accommodate ourselves.” (p. 30) Later Winters hints that something like Carl Jung’s conception of archetypes might offer a way of specifying the need for architecture in that positing archetypes helps make sense of “the view that we are pre-dispositionally given to mythical accounts of those aspects of experience we cannot understand” (p. 76) and “that there are anthropological convergences which are to be accounted for by our condition as pre-disposed persons.” (p. 78) Winters’s discussion is fragmentary and allusive in the extreme, but I take it (perhaps wrongly) that he means that our need for dwelling, and hence for architecture, is psychologically and culturally expressed in and through our ‘pre-disposition’ to make sense of ourselves as people who inhabit a place through building. Into this Heideggerian-Jungian conception Winters folds Gottfried Semper’s account of the four elements of architecture. In the mid-19th century Semper argued that all architecture stems from and articulates four ‘elements’: the hearth around which people gather; the enclosure or walls that separate inside from outside; the roof that protects from sun and rain; and the mound upon which structures are built. Winters urges that Semper’s “elements are to be seen as our responses to pre-dispositional needs . . . [t]hey provide suitable response to a more general motive [i.e. the need for dwelling.” (p. 155)

     Architectural Meaning: As noted above, for Winters the kind of meaningfulness distinctive of works of art is that of ‘aesthetic ideas’ in Kant’s sense. How does artistic meaning, that is, the possession of aesthetic ideas, arise in the case of architecture? Winters approaches it by analogy with Richard Wollheim’s account of how artistic paintings acquire meaning (see p. 159). According to Winters, Wollheim claims that “[t]he medium of painting is such that the materials of the painter are mobilized toward representational ends” (p. 115); and Winters later re-states this point without elaboration as “the application of paint to a flat surface in order to develop representational content explains the medium through its exploitation of properties of the paint-as-applied” (p. 199), where the properties of ‘paint-as-applied’ are that a viewer of such paint is aware both of the material properties of the paint and of what the paint represents (p. 96, with reference to Wollheim (1987)). Since Winters accepts without qualification the Kantian conception of artistic meaning across the individual arts as consisting of works’ embodying aesthetic ideas, he must be identifying the representational content of artistic paintings as a type of aesthetic idea. But Winters offers not a single word of explication on this point, and instead turns to asserting and re-asserting that a work of architecture’s having some function in no way blocks its status as a work of fine art, since architecture as an art form is an instance of adherent beauty.

     Responses on dwelling and artistic meaning: As is evident from my summaries, on both points Winters’s accounts are so brief and unelaborated that first of all one just wants fuller statements and elucidations. Further, I have no sense at all of how Winters might respond to criticisms, in particular of any involving a rejection of the Kantian framework. Another major discontent with Winters’s account is perhaps pedantic, but inevitable: his explicit statements of both Heidegger’s account of dwelling and the fourfold and of Wollheim’s account of the artistic medium of painting are highly idiosyncratic and at best misleading in their very partial character. For example, what Heidegger actually writes about dwelling in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ is: “To dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free sphere that cares-for each thing in its own nature. The fundamental character of dwelling is this caring-for.” (I give the translation from Julian Young (2002), a book that gives a careful, documented account of Heidegger’s conception of dwelling and its internal connection with the doctrine of the fourfold). Nothing of this ‘caring-for’ shows up in Winters’s account. With regard to Wollheim, Winters writes as if unaware that for Wollheim artistic painting possesses not just representational content, but also expression as kinds of what Wollheim called ‘primary’ meaning, as well as an indeterminately large class of kinds of ‘secondary’ meaning arising from the ways in which artistic painters elaborate primary meaning.

     General responses: Abstracting from problems that arise from exceptionally brief and fragmentary statement of his claims and failure to provide explications, one might still raise a number of significant objections that point to ways in which the philosophy of architecture might be pursued differently. First of all, one might object to the untroubled adherence to the conception of the fine arts and of Kantian aesthetics as the most fruitful way of thinking about architecture as an art form. The modern system of the fine arts was, as famously diagnosed by Kristeller, an artifact of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and has been widely criticized and mostly rejected, in practice, in institutions, and in philosophical aesthetics, for over half a century. Winters’s quasi-Kantian conception of the arts as having ‘beauty’ for their goal is quaint, to say the least.

     Secondly, one might raise a host of questions about Winters’s conception of use or function. He writes as if unaware of a large and heterogeneous body of philosophical writing that puts pressure on the simple understanding of artifacts as things made to have a single function or use, a corpus that includes works by Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Barry Allen, and Beth Preston. Moreover, in following Kant on adherent beauty, he writes that the centrality of function to architecture necessarily introduces conceptual constraints upon artistic building, but he misses the point that in art constraints characteristically play a role in the creation of a range of kinds of artistic meaningfulness (on this see, for example, Elster (1983)).

    On account of these massive problems with Winters’s book—the fragmentary argumentation, undefended and seemingly obsolete framework, idiosyncrasy without illumination, failure to consider a great deal of obviously relevant literature—there is little to recommend. The good news perhaps is that there’s a great deal of work to be done in the philosophy of architecture.

References:

Barry Allen, Artifice and Design (2008)

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1980)

Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (1983)

Gordon Graham, The Re-enchantment of the World: Art versus Religion (2007)

Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture (1997)

-----Review of Winters (2007) in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (2008)

Martin Heidegger, The Turning’ (1950), in The Question Concerning Technology and other Essays (1977)

-----‘The Thing’ (1951) and ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ (1954), in Poetry, Language, Thought (1971)

Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (2013)

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790)

Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963)

Paul O. Kristeller, ‘The Modern System of the Arts” (1951-2) in Renaissance Thought and the Arts (1980)

Dominic Lopes, Beyond Art (2014)

Christian Norberg-Schulz, The Concept of Dwelling: On the Way to Figurative Architecture (1985)

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

Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Architecture (2002)

Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture  (1851)

Gilbert Simondon, Imagination and Invention (2022, originally 1965-66)

Edward Winters, Aesthetics and Architecture (2007)

-----Architectural Aesthetics: Appreciating Architecture as an Art (2023)

Richard Wollheim, “Are the Criteria for Works of Art Aesthetically Relevant?” in Art and its Objects (1980)

-----Painting as an Art (1987)

Julian Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy (2002)

Reflections and Responses: On Tay Tay

     Recently I learned from Freddie DeBoer’s blog that NYU has a Taylor Swift question on its application form. This reminded me that about a decade ago, the wisest of men, Felipe Gutterriez, told me that my ignorance of Swift and her music was culpable, and that I really should get with the 21st century program. So I watched one time on YouTube the video of her hit ‘Shake It Off’. Alas, I couldn’t get past the fact that it looked like someone had daubed Audrey Hepburn with lipstick after she’d fallen into a vat of liquid white chocolate. Though Voltaire warned me with his truism when he was invited back to an orgy for seconds--“Once a philosopher, twice a pervert”—I decided to risk perversion and give Swift a second try. A trip to Los Angeles, with long hours sitting in traffic, was the perfect setting for listening twice to Swift’s canonical album 1989.

       By the sheerest and most fortunate of chances, I returned to find a Taylor Swift questionnaire. Of course I filled it out immediately and sent it off to NYU. I post it here, knowing that my answers will likely go viral. Having just read Jarett Kobek’s i hate the internet, I know my fate:

1.     How many thousands of hours have you listened to Taylor Swift?

Answer: .05

2.     What is your favorite Taylor song?

Answer: I haven’t heard it yet.

3.     What is Taylor’s greatest virtue as a songwriter?

Answer: She finds the hooks in the patter. In 1932 George Gershwin wrote: “The rhythms of American popular music are more or less brittle; they should be made to snap, and at times to crackle.” Swift don’t got rhythm, but she do got snap and crackle.

4.     Who orchestrates Taylor’s songs?

Answer: The love child of Phil Spector and General Jack D. Ripper. It’s as if in every song there’s a war in the distance: attack helicopters, raiding bombers, and a charging brigade all playing synthesizers and drum-kits. I kept expecting the songs to end with the 1812 Overture.

5.     Everybody says that Taylor’s songs are all about her break-ups. Comment:

Answer: You can’t shake that one off. My idea is that love songs are on a spectrum with ‘Love Minus Zero/No Limit’ in the middle, and ‘Unchained Melody’ and ‘Why don’t we get drunk and screw?’ at the ends. There’s no passion, no yearning, no life-affirming vulgarity, no grief, no regret in Swift’s songs. Instead it’s as if the sentiments of a jaded 25 year-old woman are expressed in the vocabulary and emotional armature of a 15 year-old girl.  Swift’s persona sings as if ‘relationships’ are nothing but persistent irritants in an otherwise Instagrammable life.

6.     When do you expect to next listen to Taylor?

Answer: On Monday after my lobotomy.

On Alva Noë’s The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are, Part Four: Beyond Boring

     By way of a provisional conclusion to considering Alva Noë’s new book, (1) I’ll draw out the comparison between Noë’s and Danto’s philosophies of art and offer a diagnostic suggestion on the source of the structural similarities between the two. Then (2) I’ll try similarly to bring out a source for some of the possible problems with his general ontology of entanglement by comparing aspects of it with the philosophical anthropologies of Helmuth Plessner and Arnold Gehlen. And finally (3) I’ll briefly suggest a different line of thinking, perhaps an alternative, perhaps a supplement, to Noë’s and Danto’s accounts that might help overcome some of their difficulties.

      Before that, I want to stress that the summary and analysis of Noë’s book that I’ve given so far is by no means comprehensive; nor does it seem to me to convey what it’s like to read the work, with its mixture of styles and kinds of address, slogans and subtle analyses, truisms and shockers, and generally the sense of being in the presence of an original and continually surprising mind and sensibility. I have also skipped what seem to me the book’s high and low points. The high point is the breathtaking criticism of what Noë calls ‘the trigger conception’ of artistic response, and which is itself embedded in an original and persuasive account of artistic response proper. The low point (for me at least) is chapter on ‘the writerly attitude’, which inherits all the problems and opacities of Noë’s account of first- and second-order organizations, while addressing the issue about the alleged simultaneous emergence of visual art, full language, and writing with some implausible speculative claims and some empirical claims so confused that I don’t see how they survived an editor’s red pen. With regard to what I’ve focused on here, the central point to which I draw attention and reflect upon is Noë’s seeming vacillation between between the sense of second-order organizations as a kind of ever-present conceptual possibility within first-order organizations, and the sense of second-order organizations as actual, that is, as practices and institutions with histories and traditions distinct from the first-order organizations out of which they arise.

     1. Contemporary philosophy of art as an expression of contemporary art:

A striking feature of both Danto’s and Noë’s philosophies of art is their claim, or at least assumption, that the artworks are distinguished from other artifacts by the possession of a single feature (which perhaps exhibits internal complexity), for Danto ‘embodiment’ (of meaning), for Noë ‘display’ (of (aspects of) first-order organization). And for both the possible possession of the feature is decisive even and especially in cases where the artwork and the non-artistic artifact are otherwise indiscernible. Now, there is a great deal to be said about the differences in their conceptions of the distinguishing characteristic. For Danto, embodiment is fundamentally semantic, in that in every case it (potentially) induces an interpretation of a point-of-view and a manner of presenting the content of the artwork; if an artifact embodies what it’s about, it’s an artwork, and the criterion of its embodying its meaning is that it solicits and sustains a stylistic interpretation. For Noë, ‘display’ is non-semantic, and is rather the mark of the activity of a second-order organization, an activity that interrupts the normal and taken-for-granted functioning of a first-order organization, investigates the lower-level organization, and induces a re-organization of it. How might we evaluate these basic features of a philosophy of art?

     One way of bringing these philosophies into focus is to ask the kinds of questions Georg Lukács asked of Kant’s moral philosophy, or Alasdair MacIntyre asked of liberalism: What is the ‘home territory’ of these philosophies? From what sort of artistic practices do they emerge, and to which do they seem appropriate and illuminating? The answers are evident: the philosophies are expressions of basic ideologies and features of contemporary art. In contemporary art Marcel Duchamp’s ‘readymades’, wherein a non-artistic artifact is chosen and dubbed an artwork. The readymade both poses the problem cases of the perceptually indiscernible pair of ordinary artifact and artwork, and secretes that conception of artistic making as a unified, conceptually simple action. Moreover, the readymade does not fit under any inherited type of an artistic genre: it is neither painting nor sculpture nor drawing, neither comedy nor tragedy. Finally, in the conceptual modeling of artistic making as a kind of dubbing, there is no sense of history, no sense of a tradition, and no sense of individual and collective learning that feeds back into prior instances of dubbing.

     Danto’s and Noë’s philosophies of art are evidently expressions of this cluster of conceptions central to the ideology of contemporary art. Does ‘dubbing’ institute embodiment of meaning and stimulate interpretation of point of view and manner? Or does ‘dubbing’ institute display with its interruption and investigations of our organizations and ultimately ourselves? Investigating these questions might very well be enormously illuminating, but the conjuring trick has already occurred in silently modeling art making as instituting a single relation. But is there an alternative to this trick?

     2. Boredom as the motive for ontology:

Of the ontologies of human life of the great philosophers, Noë’s is surely closest to that of John Dewey, for Dewey stresses the fundamental openness and embodiment of human life, self-organization through habit, inquiry as an existential phenomenon, and the revisability of views and orientations in light of the results of inquiry. One of the most striking basic differences between Dewey’s conception and Noë’s lies in Dewey’s focus on experience as structured by a trajectory of anticipation, activity, and consummation. There is nothing of this in Noë. Rather, for him experience in its everydayness of habitual action is boring, a kind of shuffling under the constraints of pre-given conceptions, functions, and goals. It is striking too that Noë has claimed that his philosophy of art is unique in that it contains his recognition that a characteristic feature of experience in galleries and museums is being bored. So for him the passage from boredom to aesthetic responsiveness is the paradigm of ontological activity generally in the sequence organizationàinterruptionàre-organization; as choreography is to dancing, so all second-orderings is to first-orderings. Noë’s fundamental characterization of human life as fragile is in effect installing on the ground floor the ever-present possibility of that sequence, and with it the ever-available possibility of ‘emancipation’, that is, relief from boredom.

     On this point it might help to bring Noë’s conception into focus by comparing it with two other philosophical anthropologies, those of Arnold Gehlen and Helmuth Plessner. Gehlen urged the fundamental conception of human beings as a ‘Mängelwesen’, a ‘being of lack’, whose lack of animalistic secure instinctual orientation to particular environments is compensated by their openness to environments and plasticity of responses. For Gehlen these basic characteristics of human beings are as it were in the service of survival, not of warding off boredom. Helmuth Plessner urged that human beings are in some sense fundamentally ‘eccentric’, whereas by contrast Noë argues that they are fundamentally ecstatic or ‘ek-static’. Plessner characterizes this eccentricity more strictly as an ‘excentric positionality’, which is meant to capture the fact that human beings simultaneously conceive and experience themselves as embodied organisms and as separate from their bodies in putting them to use in a field of possible projects. So like Gehlen, and unlike Noë, Plessner derives his ontological characterizations from basic facts about human embodiment and basic human needs and interests. As with Noë’s philosophy of art, it is hard to escape the thought that the home ground of Noë’s ontology of fragility and ecstasy is a very recent institutional complex, the social life of the more creative members of the iron cage of academia.--I can attest to this: the only times in my life when I have been afflicted by soul-crushing boredom are at academic faculty meetings.

     3. The Alternative? A Suggestion:

I have suggested that Noë’s philosophy of art, like Arthur Danto’s, is an expression of contemporary art, but that perhaps neither contains conceptual resources sufficient for understanding contemporary art. One way of starting to fill out this suggestion begins by noting that these two accounts contain no account of what is quaintly referred to as ‘the artistic process’, that is, the temporally extended complex of activities that issue in an artwork, and that are further embedded in practices and institutions. Danto’s and Noë’s accounts of art are fundamentally spectatorial: for Danto it is the interpretative activity of a viewer that signals the presence of embodiment of meaning; for Noë it is the investigation of display and re-organization (nota bene: for the viewer, not the artist) that distinguishes the existential trajectory of an artwork from that of a non-artistic artifact. Interestingly, Danto seemed to recognize at the very end of his life his fundamentally spectatorial and so incomplete characterization of an artwork. In his very last book What Art Is,  he suggests that his characterization of an artwork as an artifact that embodies its meaning needs to be supplemented by a second characterization, namely, that an artwork has the character of a ‘waking dream’; this is supposed to indicate that the artwork is a thing of appearance (and so dream-like), but also that it is something made in a sustained manner (and so a thing of wakefulness). In any case, whether as a replacement for or supplement to both accounts, some account that begins from the activities of the artist is needed. I am thinking of an account like that of artistic painting from Richard Wollheim, who starts from the conceptual scene of primordial painting where an artist deposits pigment on a surface and monitors the effects produced in order to create and heighten meaning. Another such account with regard to drawing comes from Patrick Maynard, who starts from a description of non-artistic drawing and shows how artists build up artistic drawing through a richer and fuller employment of the devices and manners of drawing within and around non-artistic drawing practices. Such accounts would additionally allow conceptual space for the historicity of art, the role of artistic practices, of genres and art kinds, etc., that seems lacking in Danto’s and Noë’s accounts. On such proposed accounts, perhaps contemporary art could seem the latest period in the long history of art, and not so much an unprecedented way of knocking out one-offs to ward off boredom.

 References:

Arthur Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981)

-----After the End of Art (1996)

-----What Art Is (2013)

John Dewey, Experience and Nature (1925)

-----Art as Experience (1934)

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

Arnold Gehlen, Man: His Nature and Place in the World (1950)

Georg Lukács, History and Class-Consciousness (1923)

Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Epilogue. 1953, 1968, 1995: Three Perspectives’, in Alasdair MacIntyre’s Engagement with Marxism (2008)

Patrick Maynard, Drawing Distinctions (2005)

Alva Noë, The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are (2023)

-----Strange Tools (2015)

Helmuth Plessner, Levels of Organic Life and the Human: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology (1928)

Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)

On Alva Noë, The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are, Part Three: Philosophy and Art as Second-Order Organizations

     I turn now to Noë’s account of art in his new book. In the acknowledgments at the end of the book he writes that shortly after the publication of Strange Tools in 2015, he began to use the term ‘entanglement’ to capture “that book’s central concern: how art loops down and changes that of which it is the representation and how this is productive and potentially emancipatory.” So the new book is a sequel to that earliest book, but also one that “makes a new beginning, and ends up covering very different ground” (p. 225). Although I find every aspect of Noë’s thought interesting and very much worth reading and pondering, my primary concern is his distinctive philosophy of art; and so I focus on that here. I must right away note that I do not see any major changes in the accounts of art between the two books. Previously I have briefly written on Strange Tools’s account of art in a review of Noë’s Learning to Look, a slight collection of his art criticism and opinion pieces. There I claimed that one could see a problem with the account as a background for and applied to art criticism: the lack of some reckoning with the fact (if it is a fact) that all art is a historical phenomenon—that all art arises at some particular time, that all art is part of some tradition (even if only to challenge or break with its tradition), that all art is part of some or other type and genre, etc.—perhaps directed Noë’s critical attentions away from the historical meanings that are in a range of cases part of an artwork’s central meanings (on this dimension of meaning, see Richard Wollheim’s Painting as a Art), and so impoverishes his accounts of particular works of art. Here I’ll try to set out Noë’s account more fully in light of his general ontology of human life (sketched in the first post) and his full statement on first- and second-order organizations (outlined in the second post).

     In the new book Noë addresses in two early chapters specific art forms: there is a chapter on Choreography or (capital ‘D’) Dance as an art, as opposed to the first-order organization and activity of dancing; and there is a chapter on seeing and picture-making wherein he seems to refer to what is usually thought of as the visual arts as consisting of ‘artwork pictures’ (p. 42) The latter chapter has very little to say about art directly, but rather ranges the nature of picture-making as a first-order activity and the ineliminability of style in pictures and in organized activities generally. The chapter on Dance/Choreography and dance, as Noë explicitly notes, is a re-working of material from Strange Tools; and the primary re-working is presenting the ‘looping’ relationship between Choreography and dance as an instance of entanglement and in light of what the ontology of human beings as fundamentally ‘ecstatic’ (for this, again, see the last part of the first post).

     Again, for Noë art and philosophy are second-order kinds of organization (and, as far as I can tell from his account, the only ones). The general formula for them is ‘X displays Y’, where Y is a first-order kind of organization, X is a second-order kind, and ‘displays’ refers to an activity whereby X interrupts and arrests, isolates, calls attention to, and holds up for investigation (some aspect of) Y. Because of the looping relation between X and Y, in and through displaying Y, X alters Y. With regard to art (but, as far as I can tell, not philosophy), Y ‘informs’ X; as Noë succinctly puts it in his central example, “Dance [i.e. Choreography, which he also calls ‘meta-dancing’ (p. 29)] alters dancing and dancing informs Dance.” (p. 30) The claim that in entanglement or looping Y informs X is of great importance for Noë, because it explains the importance of the arts. Human beings are fundamentally self-organizing sets of organizations and re-organizations who make their way through life with their basic first-order organizations of nursing, walking, talking, seeing, picturing, dancing, etc. Choreography is important in human life because dancing is important; artistic pictures are important because first-order picturing is. The arts inherit the importance of the first-order organizations they display and (help) re-organize. 

     In the new book Noë says next to nothing about what artworks are, and it is a peculiar feature of Noë’s writing that he never gives any account at all of what distinguishes art and philosophy. In Strange Tools he says that art “is a philosophical practice” (p. 75; see also p. 134f). In his sloganistic style he there asserts (italics in the original) that “Choreography is philosophy”, (ibid, p. 16) in that “both philosophy and choreography aim at the same thing—a kind of understanding that, in Wittgenstein’s phrase, consists in having a perspicuous representation—but they do it, so to speak, in different neighborhoods of our existence Philosophy is the choreography of ideas and concepts and beliefs . . . Choreography, in turn, is the philosophy of dancing (or of movement).” (ibid, p. 17) In the new book he explicates the sense in which philosophical understanding consists in having a perspicuous representation with the example of the logician Gottlob Frege’s analysis of number.  A decade ago Noë had discussed Frege’s analysis in order to show that philosophy does not offer definitive proof of claims, but rather a type of shareable understanding of something—some field, dimension, practice, etc.-- that is potentially persuasive (in Varieties of Presence, pp. 135-151). Now Noë repeats that account of Frege with the addition that what Frege’s analysis of number as a kind of concept, and adds that Frege there “is working to give us an overview, a “perspicuous representation”, of ourselves, of ourselves insofar as we are inside, embedded within and owners of a range of habits, skills, attitudes, and beliefs that we find ourselves antecedently saddled with . . . Frege is offering us a new way of understanding or positioning ourselves in relation to a practice structure in which we already find ourselves.” (p. 178) Beyond this, Noë offers no further explication or clarification of what he means by (the Wittgensteinian phrase) ‘perspicuous representation’, which is purportedly the result of both artistic and philosophical activity. Accordingly, it seems to me that the reference to the technical term is otiose, and the work of analysis of philosophy and art is done through and exhausted with the discussion of second-order organizations as interrupting first-order ones, investigating them, and inducing re-organizations, that is, entanglement as looping. Surprisingly, the chapter of picturing, which includes an extended discussion of style, likewise offers no thoughts on distinctively artistic style; rather, the sense of style that Noë considers is a matter of basic features of human embodiment, perception, and organization.

     So, as Noë himself suggests, with regard to his philosophy of art, The Entanglement represents an extension and re-framing of the account given in Strange Tools, with the earlier account now embedded within and articulated in terms of the phenomenon of entanglement or looping purportedly shown to be fundamental and pervasive in human life. How might Noë’s startlingly original and thought-provoking account be assessed? As in the previous post, where I compared Noë’s understanding of looping with that of Ian Hacking, here and in my next post I’ll attempt to clarify Noë’s philosophy of art through a comparison with that by Arthur Danto. In 1964 Danto published his path-breaking essay ‘The Artworld’, followed in 1981 by his justly famous fundamental book in the philosophy of art, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. In the barest outline, Danto argues as follows: Artifacts are distinguished from mere things by virtue of the fact that they are ‘about’ something. Artworks are distinguished from mere artifacts by virtue of the fact that they ‘embody’ what they’re about. The distinction between mere artifacts and artworks is a conceptual distinction, not a distinction given through perception and perceptible characteristics. The authoritative agency that makes this conceptual distinction is called ‘the artworld’, which is not a sociological entity of people, their roles, and institutions, but is rather ‘an atmosphere of theory’, theories that at contemporaneously held and operative at the time that the work is made, and which inter alia provide the criteria in light of which the decision is made. Danto offers no exhaustive account of what it means for an artwork of ‘embody’ what it’s about, but he urges that central to embodiment, and so to what makes an artifact an artwork are the possession of rhetoric (some address to an audience), style (a meaning-bearing manner of presented content), and expression (a complex notion in Danto’s view, but very crudely and somewhat circularly put, it is some basic metaphor the application of which transforms the material properties of the artifact into vehicles of artistic meaning). Starting in the mid-1980’s, and culminating in his book After the End of Art, Danto offers an historical account of the passage between modern and contemporary art: modern art was ‘historical’ in the sense that it presented an intelligible trajectory wherein the question ‘What is (a work of) art?’ was made focal and increasingly stringent. The question ‘What is (a work of) art?’ is a philosophical question. With the work of Andy Warhol, the question is posed as clearly as possible, and so art as a philosophical enterprise comes to an end. The question, seemingly the only serious one with regard to art, is then taken up by philosophy. Contemporary art, the period that follows modern art, offers then an art of non-finite possibilities of meaning, presentation, and genre, but it is fundamentally unserious because unphilosophical.

     By conclusion here, and as a preliminary to my final post on Noë’s book, I note a number of structural similarities between Danto’s and Noë’s accounts. Whereas the philosopher Hegel in the 1820s treated art and philosophy together with religion as forms of what he called ‘Absolute Spirit’, each with a distinctive way of embodying the ‘Absolute’ (very roughly, our most serious concerns as given in historically varying ways in thought, practice, and institutions), the more recent accounts silently drop religion and treat philosophy and art together and alone as vehicles of reflective seriousness. Both treat the difference between art or artworks on the one hand, and everyday artifacts or organizational habits on the other, through a single characteristic: for Danto, ‘embodiment/embodying ideas’; for Noë, ‘display’. Both practice art criticism wherein they often repeat points made in their general philosopies of art, but where they also draw in an eclectic and ad hoc manner from other kinds of philosophical and art historical accounts of artistic meaning. Both insist upon and make central cases where artworks are not perceptibly discernible from correlative artifacts. For neither do evolutionary accounts play any important role, nor is the historical dimension of art central to their accounts. Like many philosophers of art, both treat one kind of art with particular attention and understanding: for Danto, the visual arts; for Noë, dance.

     What if anything is significant and revealing about these close structural parallels between Danto’s and Noë’s basic conceptions in the philosophy of art? In my final post, I’ll reflect on these common characteristics; then compare Noë’s ontology of human beings with some other prominent accounts of philosophical anthropology from the twentieth-century, those Helmut Plessner, Arnold Gehlen, and Hans Blumenberg; and finally sketch an alternative account of art and artistic meaning that might plug the gaps in Noë’s and Danto’s philosophy of art with regard to artistic meaning, history, and institutions.

References:

Arthur Danto, ‘The Artworld’ (1964)

-----Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981)

-----After the End of Art (1996)

G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (1820s; first published posthumously in 1835)

Alva Noë, The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are (2023)

-----Learning to Look (2021)

-----Strange Tools (2015)

John Rapko, ‘Review of Alva Noë’s Learning to Look’, academia.edu

Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)

On Alva Noë’s The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are, Part Two: Entangled Up in Ian Hacking

     Having summarized the ontology of human life Alva Noë presents in his new book, I turn now to a more extended consideration of his central concept, entanglement. The book’s subtitle, How Art And Philosophy Make Us What We Are, rightly indicates that for Noë both art and philosophy are central aspects of entanglement, and he states that art and philosophy are entangled with life. (202) Readers of Noë’s earlier, path-breaking book on art, Strange Tools, are familiar with his sometimes enchanting, sometimes dismaying manner of presentation--a mix of slogans, careful analyses, over-statements, counter-intuitive shockers, re-workings of motifs from the philosophers John Dewey, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the psychologist J. J. Gibson, and occasionally breath-taking insights—that can leave the reader fascinated, stimulated, and likely dumb-struck. I’ve come to think that Noë’s thought is best approached through some consideration of his sources, and through comparison of his accounts with those of relevantly similar philosophers. In this way one can get his distinctive views into focus; one can thereby see what he has appropriated and re-worked, but also what he has dropped. Now, Noë has made it clear that his conception of entanglement is indebted to the work of the philosopher Ian Hacking that centered on the concept of ‘looping’: “Looping concepts give us a clear instance of the phenomenon at the heart of our investigation, namely, entanglement.” (153, italics in original). So what is looping?

1.     Hacking on ‘looping’:

     In the early 1980s the philosopher Ian Hacking, who had previously published books on probability, on the importance of language in recent philosophy, and a major work in the philosophy of science, turned his attention to historically recent classifications of abnormal mental states and conditions, such as schizophrenia, transient madness, and multiple personalities. He initially presented and reflected upon some of these studies in an epoch-making lecture in 1983 entitled ‘Making Up People’. There he suggested that the phenomenon he had discovered was most appropriately conceptualized within a framework he called ‘dynamic nominalism’, whose central claim is “that a kind of person came into being at the same time as the kind itself was being invented. In some cases, that is, our classifications and our classes conspire to emerge hand in hand, each egging the other on.” (Hacking (2002), 106) Put alternatively, “[t]he category and the people in it emerged hand in hand.” (ibid., 107) The central idea is that there are startling many cases in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries of a peculiar phenomenon in classifying people: as soon as some new concept of a person with a disorder—the hysteric, the narcissist, the schizophrenic, etc. etc.—is proposed, people to whom this novel conception are ‘made up’, that is, some of those who are (potentially) named really are so named, as they experience, act, and are treated in light of the new conception. Hacking cites  Elizabeth Anscombe’s famous claim that all action is under a description, and in a range of cases the new conception describes an emergent way of acting, and so of being.  In the 1990s Hacking elaborated his conception of dynamic nominalism while simultaneously restricting its scope. He distinguished two great classes of ‘kinds’, interactive kinds and indifferent kinds. The former, but not the latter, exhibit the phenomenon that Hacking, and then Noë following him, will call looping: when a new classification is introduced, the people named by the new term will (in some cases) adopt the term, and thereby change something of who they are, how they conceive of themselves, how they act, and how they think of their field of possible action. With interactive kinds, naming is dynamic and changes the thing named. With indifferent kinds, a new term may be introduced, but the thing named remains the same; Hacking’s example of this is quarks. Hacking suggests that interactive kinds are largely coextensive with the subject matter of the human sciences, and unsurprisingly indifferent kinds with the subject matter of the natural sciences. In his new book Noë cites Hacking’s formulation from the 1990s as the stimulus or source of his own conception of looping.

     However, this was not the end of Hacking’s reflections upon looping, although Noë ignores Hacking’s last statement upon it. In 2006 Hacking delivered a British Academy lecture wherein he markedly altered and re-framed his prior quarter of a century of investigations. He begins by summarizing his earlier conceptualization: “I coined two slogans. The first one, ‘making up people’, referred to the ways in which a new scientific classification may bring into being a new kind of person, conceived of and experienced as a way to be a person. The second, the ‘looping effect’, referred to the way in which a classification may interact with the people classified” (Hacking (2007), 286). However, he renounces his earlier distinction between interactive (human) kinds and indifferent (natural) kinds, because he no longer thinks they are two such well-defined types of kinds: the idea of distinct natural kinds has collapsed under recent scrutiny by several philosophers, and the idea of human kinds is “totally confused,” (ibid, 291) Still, although there are no interactive kinds, there are ‘interactive effects’, that is, the phenomenon of looping. Already in 1983 Hacking had asserted that there could be no general theory of ‘making up people’, because each case involved many factors and was different in significant ways from any and all other instances of such making. In this last consideration Hacking offers a 5-part framework that must be invoked in any account of making up people: in every case one must consider (a) the particular classification; (b) the specific individuals and peoples so classified; (c) the institutions wherein the new kinds of ways in which the novel classification is adopted and within which relevant actions take place; (d) knowledge about the kinds of peoples; (e) and the experts involved who at least initially propose the new classifications. Finally, Hacking adds the point that dynamic nominalism is also historical nominalism, in that the dynamics of the five factors involve extended historical changes among shifting conjunctions of the factors, as well as broader historical shifts in sociological phenomena such as the authority of experts, the emergence and decay of institutions, the vicissitudes of individualism, and the rise of social movements that might adopt, contest, or transform the new classifications.

2.     Noë on entanglement and looping:

     Noë argues that the phenomenon (or activity?) of entanglement is both central to all human life, in that it is bound to the basic existential-ontological characterization of human beings as stylistic, fragile, and ecstatic (as briefly described at the end of my previous post). Entanglement is also pervasive in human life, in that it characterizes many, and perhaps all, major spheres of human life: art and philosophy are entangled with life; writing is entangled with speech; gender and sex are entangled; etc. In order to explicate Noë’s conception of entanglement, I introduce a claim and a small set of distinctions; I am by no means sure that Noë would agree with these moves. First, I will interpret Noë’s statements about entanglement as statements about the existence of looping: where there is entanglement, there is the phenomenon of looping; and if there is no looping, there is no entanglement. Second (here Noë would surely wince), I will divide his statements about entanglement into three types: (i) very general and (seemingly) sloganistic claims, such as ‘art and philosophy are entangled with life’; (ii) stricter statements, where ‘entanglement’ refers to the looping that arises from the nature of first-order organizations (habits, practices, etc.) and the second-order dimension ‘within’ those first-order organizations, which when activated takes the form of philosophy or art; (iii) a sub-set of (ii), where Noë describes the looping effects proper to the arts: the looping of choreography and dance, of artistic depiction and ordinary depiction, and of the writerly attitude and ordinary language. Here I ignore the statements of (i) and focus on (ii) (I’ll consider (iii) in my new next post).

     Hacking’s account of looping develops and sharpens over a quarter of a century, but at all times is quite distinct from Noë’s conception. For Hacking, looping is a recently phenomenon, and a relatively rare, or at least non-pervasive, one in human life. And in no case can looping be understood without placing the phenomenon in the five-factor analysis and with further consideration of broader socio-historical phenomena. Contrastingly, Noë’s conception of looping is part of a fundamental ontology of human life. Recall Noë’s central characterization of looping: habits are first-order kinds of organization, and second-order kinds of organization exist as potentials within all first-order kinds. Noë adds the point that first-order organizations are guided by models and conceptions (something like Anscombe’s point), and that these models and conceptions are products of second-order re-organizations, and so in this sense second-order organizations ground, or are more conceptually basic than, first-order practices. Second-order organizations are further responses to the pervasive ‘aesthetic predicament’ of human life, where human beings lack as it were stable and definitive organizations. The aesthetic predicament pervades human life, and though uniquely addressed by the second-order activities of art and philosophy, the predicament is in principle never resolved or dissolved.

     When did the predicament start? Noë argues that the phenomena and characteristics he discusses—entanglement, looping, art and philosophy, etc.—are coeval and characteristic of human life. He notes the standard point that biologically human beings seemed to have emerged 150-200,000 years ago, but that the basic characteristics of human life as described by Noë seem to have emerged together around 40-50,000 years ago. Noë oddly claims that consideration of evolutionary factors, such as how distinctively biological human beings emerged, and how the species of such beings evolved (biologically and/or culturally) in their first 100,000 years causes the phenomenon he’s interested in to vanish; for Noë, human life is all or nothing, and all of a piece. The dates that Noë gives for the beginning of (full) human life are those that are more typically referred to by anthropologists and archeologists as the beginnings of ‘cultural modernity’, which is usually characterized as the beginnings of ‘symbolism’, and in particular of the arts (there is direct evidence of the visual and musical arts, and more indirect evidence of linguistic and theatrical arts).

     3. Questions for Noë’s ontology:    

     One immediate effect of Noë’s methodological decision to treat human (‘culturally modern) life as emergent all at once, and to claim that the core phenomenon of looping characterizes human life from 50,000 years ago to the present, is to eliminate history from consideration. Likewise, this methodology eliminates consideration of practices (as organized individual and social phenomena that develop, combine, decay, etc), institutions, and political life generally (except in the etiolated contemporary sense of self-other distinctions in terms of gender and skin color). But can an account that treats practices, institutions, and history generally as adventitious make sense of the arts, which are not atypically characterized as essentially historical? And consideration of the effects of this methodological decision potentially casts light on another peculiarity of Noë’s account. Common-sensically, and indeed also on Noë’s own account, ‘entanglement’ involves (at least) two distinct factors; otherwise, what’s entangled? On this fundamental point Noë’s characterizations seem inconsistent. For Hacking always, and sometimes for Noë, looping is a temporal and historical phenomenon; in Strange Tools one of his central examples is clothing: people dress in such-and-such a way, their dress is displayed in artistic painting, which brings into focus their dress and suggests new models for dressing, then these models guide new ways of dressing. Yet in many of his formulations Noë describes the phenomenon in terms of dimensions that are somehow active and interactive, and as such take place continuously across human life for the past 50,000 years. I’ll return to this problem, and suggest ways of altering Noë’s account, in my final post.

     Next I’ll address what is for me the chief concern, Noë’s distinctive account of the arts. Much of what he says in the new book is quite close to his views in Strange Tools, but some formulations have been dropped, the phenomenon of style moves to the center, and the account is now embedded in the larger framework of entanglement. Is this an improvement?

References:

G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention (1957)

Ian Hacking, ‘Making People Up’ (1983) in Historical Ontology (2002)

-----‘The looping effects of human kinds’, in Dan Sperber et al (eds), Causal Cognition: An Interdisciplinary Approach (1995)

-----The Social Construction of What? (1999)

-----‘Kinds of People: Moving Targets’, Proceedings of the British Academy (2007)

Alva Noë, The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are (2023)

-----Strange Tools (2015)

On Alva Noë’s The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are, Part One: Ecstasies on Penelope’s Loom

      The philosopher Alva Noë’s new book The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are is this century’s first major contribution to a full philosophy of art. It offers not only an original and fascinating account of the basic characteristics of the arts and the point of art; but also it places art in determinate relations with other major aspects of human life, gives a revisionary account of the nature of aesthetics as the content of the arts, characterizes the arts together with philosophy as the major ways in which human beings address aesthetics, and finally places all of this within a kind of philosophical anthropology of human life as fundamentally and inescapably fragile and ecstatic. And all of this is done in a little over 220 short pages full of slogans, counter-intuitive assertions, and analyses, and with a good deal of repetition and riffing.

     The ambitiousness, striking originality, and systematicity of the book merit extended consideration. First, I’ll begin here with a sketch of Noë’s over-all conception, then in three further posts move to a detailed explication of his central conception, ‘entanglement’, then consider specifically of his account of art, and finally offer some questions, criticisms, reflections, and a counter-proposal for the philosophy of art. In this first part, and only here, I’ll refrain giving quotations from and references in the book, in order to convey only some sense of Noë’s basic claims and how they fit together. Likewise, I’ll postpone extended explication or criticism of his points until the following three posts.

1.     Organization as the fundamental characteristic of human life:

Noë treats all aspects of human life—capacities like perception and thought; any and all skills; basic features like walking and talking; making artifacts, and accordingly any techniques and technologies involved; practices like science and design; and the reflective activities of art and philosophy—as kinds, moments, or modes of what he calls ‘organization’. Organization is always an achievement, not a mere given or something passively undergone, and has two aspects: (a) it is part of a human being’s embodied relation to and inter-relation with the world, wherewith a human being gains some sort of access to phenomena, which Noë usually refers to as what ‘shows up’ or what is ‘available’; (b) organization for a human being is always a self-organization, a way producing oneself as a certain kind of being. Noë’s most typical examples of a kind of organization in human life are habits.

     2. Structural aspects of organizations:

Organizations and all their aspects are achievements; they come to be at some point within human lives. Note that even the earliest organizations, such as nursing and crawling, arise after birth. Noë does not discuss permanent loss of (an) organization, although surely he would acknowledge such as consistent with his human ontology as whole. His focus is overwhelming on the constant possibility of a person’s passage from a particular organization to a reorganization in that aspect of life.

     Most changes within an organization are non-structural and do not induce re-organization. Noe’s typical examples of such changes are in perception and language-use: one perceives something, and then one alters how one perceives it (by looking at it from a different angle, in a different light, from a different distance, through a microscope, by turning it around, etc. etc.) to bring it into better focus with regard to some purpose, or in light of a different purpose. Similarly, in language use one might phrase something differently, ask for clarification, stipulate meanings, produce metaphors, explicate catachreses, etc. etc., in order to bring what’s being said into greater focus. In everyday activity and across a vast range of ordinary types of organization, people make such alterations continually, and part of what it means to be organized is that one is aware of the constant possibility and regular use of such alterations internal to organizations.

     3. First-order organizations and philosophy and art as second-order organizations:

     All but two kinds of organization are ‘first-order’. Any (first-order) organization is a way gaining access to phenomena, that which ‘shows up’. First-order organizations are oriented toward fulfilling some one or many pre-given and stable functions. It seems to me that Noë’s use of the term ‘first-order’ largely gains meaning by contrasting it with the term ‘second-order’. What is second-order organization? There are two (and seemingly only two) kinds of second-order organizations: philosophy and art. What makes a kind of organization, and by implication phenomena such as habits, skills, and practices, a second-order one is that it ‘displays’ some (other) kind of (first-order) organization. With regard to the arts, Noë’s constant examples are: (the art of) choreography displays (the activity of) dance; (the art of) painting displays (the activity of) depiction and/or design; the arts of language use (poetry, novels, etc.) display everyday language use.

     Second-order organizations and associated practices are not rightly understood as somehow floating free from first-order practices, available at whim to display any and all first-order practices. Rather, second-order practices are permanent possibilities, occasionally actualized, within first-order practices. Noë’s typical scenario for such actualization is when something problematic arises within the exercise of a (first-order) kind of organization. Instead of the everyday kinds of internal alterations noted above, a reflection upon the organization arises, as it were from within. This reflection has the character of interrupting, disrupting, and disabling the organization. The organization is (temporarily?) disorganized, and as disruptive such reflection is emancipatory in breaking the chains of habitual perception, thought, and action. In different ways the second-order organization produces a new conception of the (now disorganized) organization. This achieved conception as it were re-enters the initial organization, and re-organizes it. Noë calls this process, from organization to disruption to re-organization, looping, and it is the paradigm of the central topic of the book, entanglement.

     However, there are hints in the text that it is not as if first-order organizations are ontologically basic, with second-order organizations as moments within them. Rather, Noë also indicates at a few points that second-order organizations are the condition for the possibility of first-order organizations. At this level of explication Noë seems to pass as it were from phenomenology to existential ontology. I am not at all sure that I (yet) understand these hints, but Noë’s thought seems to be that second-order organizations are fundamentally re-organizational practices, and that re-organization occurs as a kind of response to a basic unfinished and unfinishable character of human life. This ontologically basic character shows itself in the Noë’s description of what he calls ‘the aesthetic predicament’. What is that?

     4. The Aesthetic Predicament:

     For Noë aesthetics, under a particular conception, pervades human life and all of its modes of organization. On this conception aesthetics has nothing in particular to do with perception, pleasure, or taste. Noë starts from Kant’s conception of an aesthetic judgment where one does not judge according to pre-given concepts, but rather one judges ‘without concepts’, in the sense that one gives a judgment in light of a feeling or sense of fittingness, without being able to offer a rational or conceptual justification for one’s judgment.  Aesthetics in this sense is highlighted in the experience of art, but it extends far beyond the realm of art and indeed pervades human life. Noë urges repeatedly that human being is an aesthetic phenomenon, which seems to mean that the aesthetic predicament is omnipresent and never definitively solved or dissolved. Accordingly, at the most fundamental level of ontological description, human beings are embodied things of becoming. Noë seems very close to Heidegger’s Being and Time here, with the claim that human beings (what Heidegger called ‘Dasein’, i.e. existence/being-there) are fundamentally problems for themselves, and that their practices can be explicated as provisional answers to the questions ‘Who am I/are we?’, ‘What are beings?’, and ultimately ‘What is Being?’ Perhaps what Noë is suggesting is that because the questionable quality of existence, as presented in the aesthetic predicament, is basic and ineliminable, and because second-order, re-organizational organizations (habits, practices, etc.) are internal to first-order organizations, the former ground the latter (a) in the temporal sense that second-order re-organizations are prior to the first-order organizations that result from the making and unmaking and re-making processuality of organization, and (b) in the conceptual sense that second-order practices are the results of addressing directly the aesthetic predicament, and the aesthetic predicament is covered up, ignored, or only indirectly and non-radically addressed in everyday, first-order, function-directed organizations. (Again, I’m not at all confident that this last part accurately captures Noë’s thought).

     5. Fragility and Ecstasy:

     What conception of human life emerges from these analyses of organization? Human being (i) is stylistic, in the sense that any organization presents a particular way of organizing; (b) fragile, in the sense that any organization is always open to disruption; and (c) ecstatic or ek-static, in that human beings are never as it were securely in a single place and at home with themselves, but always driven to ‘stand outside themselves’ in calling into question their particular ways of organizing. The drive to alter is given fundamentally in the pervasive ‘looping’ phenomenon of the entanglement.

      Accordingly, in my next post I will try, with full quotation and references, to explicate what Noë means by the entanglement. Once that conception is clarified, we’ll be in a position to grasp (in a third post) Noë’s distinctive conception of philosophy and art.

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927)

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790)

Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (1970)

Alva Noë, The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are (2023)

Art Criticism: The Song-Writing Analogy

     Recently I was at a couple of friends’ house for dinner. We sat in the kitchen as she was finishing the fettucine with vegetables. He asked me about writing art criticism. Here’s the conversation, as near as I can remember:

He: What do you need to know about a particular artist to write on their show?

Me: I found that what’s most helpful is to know who they particularly love, and who they especially hate. So suppose I learn that the artist loves Matisse and hates Picasso. I’m looking at the pieces in the show, and ask myself: What aspect of Matisse are they oriented themselves to? Color, saturation, space? And what is in these, modeled in a particular way, understood in a particular way, and used to orient in a particular way, would be something of which Picasso was incapable, and where he went in a different way, a way that couldn’t occur in these works . . .

He: But how do you know that you’ve figured out the relevant particular right and wrong ways?

Me: The philosopher of art Richard Wollheim once said to me: ‘Paintings have a way of teaching you what you need to know to understand them.’ It’s a matter of whether a way is rewarding, where ‘rewarding’ means offers pleasure and leads to something. The works offer rewards if seen in this way, and maybe also this other way and that way . . .

He: But it’s all subjective, isn’t it?

Me: Well, uh, yeah, but what isn’t? The criticism is something you offer to another, and they take it up, or they don’t, and they find it illuminating, or they don’t.

He: But still, how do you know what to write about?

Me: Well, when I wrote art criticism, I would always see the show at least twice. I’d see it once, and just, you know, look; then I’d go off for a few days and think about it, read about it, the artist, and whatever seemed relevant. Then I’d see it again and look until I saw something, had some insight, or seeming insight. And that  [claps hands] is the piece: I describe the works in light of the first viewing, and then try to write something that will lead the reader to the insight.

He: How do you lead someone?

Me: I think of it as starting from something that the art historian Michael Baxandall said. Think about what you say when you’re looking at a painting with a friend. There’s a lot of pointing and grunting. You point there, and say something like ‘See what she did, with that color’; the friend says ‘Huh’, then says, ‘Yeah, and there’s that same green over there, but look . . . “; you say, “Yeah”; the friend points at a different area, moves their hand back and forth, and says “Huh”; etc. etc. So we’re typically quite inarticulate in front of a painting. What we seem to be doing is trying out ways of looking, of noticing, and of grouping. Why? Well, there’s a ‘reward’ as order, I mean the understanding of order, emerges. And for anything that’s more than mediocre, it’s a non-finite process. If the work is great, the process is non-finite and profound. Further: the language of art criticism is like an elaborated way of pointing and grunting. If the criticism succeeds, if it communicates, it’s helping induce the relevant process.

He: So it is a kind of knowledge?

Me: I think of it on analogy to song-writing. Hey She, do you remember that book I was reading at the café when you and the Lesser She sat down with me? The book about songs? I was telling you about the incredible analysis in it of Feste’s song in Twelfth Night, you know [sings tunelessly], ‘When that I was and a little tiny boy,/With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,/A foolish thing was but a toy,/For the rain it raineth every day.’—‘The rain it raineth every day’: that’s my favorite line in a song—It’s a bit fractured in the syntax, parts of it are borrowed, but it speaks to you, even though you don’t quite know what it means. It’s about having lived, and there’s a bit of rain in every life every day, and you sing about it, for others, or so you hope. And that’s art criticism as I understand it and tried to practice it: you take whatever you find, from platitudes to epiphanies, and you speak to someone in the presence of this beautiful thing. You communicate, or you don’t.

She: Dinner is served.

References:

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

Mark W. Booth, The Experience of Songs (1981)

William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, or What You Will

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)