In my previous blog post I introduced the thought that a characteristic feature of contemporary visual arts is that works of art are allegedly made not only in art media as traditionally defined—graphite on paper as a drawing, oil paint on canvas as a painting, and so forth--; but also works are made in expanded versions of traditional media—an animated film is an instance of (expanded) drawing, an artist’s display of fireworks is an instance of (expanded) painting, etc. I then sketched the philosophical account of drawing and painting recently offered in Paul Crowther’s What Drawing and Painting Really Mean (2017) as a potential contribution to thinking about whether, in what senses, and to what ends one might think of non-traditional artistic activities as parts of expanded media. Again, Crowther’s account goes like this: Painting and drawing are best and most fully understood as instances of what the philosopher Ernst Cassirer referred to as ‘symbolic forms’, which are systematic ways for human beings of exhibiting and developing non-compulsory activities, institutions, and media wherein they articulate their most basic orientation to the world as sensuous, perceiving, thinking, embodied beings. Cassirer’s chief examples of symbolic media are language, myth, religion, and art. Crowther extends Cassirer’s account to the particular art forms of drawing and painting, which share a common structure given in the phrase ‘marking a surface’. Marked surfaces carry a range of meanings, as the results of gestures, as possessing visual or pictorial dynamics, and as articulating existential relationships to the self and the world. Drawing and painting differ in that the former involves the creation of points and lines on a surface, bears the sense of incising the surface, and leaves parts of the surface untouched and unaltered; whereas painting involves depositing of pigment on a surface and so not altering the surface through incision or pressure, the tendency to cover the entire surface, and with that covering to introduce to a heightened degree the sense of light, and a further sense of the general animation of the world. How might we assess Crowther’s account and its contribution to critiquing the concept of an expanded artistic medium? Consider how Crowther differentiates his account in claiming that painting and drawing are symbolic forms. Early in the book he notes that only the philosopher Richard Wollheim “has focused on the properties of drawing and painting as unique artistic media in any extended way.” (p. 7) Crowther refers in particular to Wollheim’s book Painting as an Art (1987), wherein begins his account of artistic painting with a thought model of ‘Ur-painting’, the conceptually primordial action of depositing paint on a surface so as to produce an artistic painting. Wollheim’s account presupposes that human beings possess a basic perceptual capacity for ‘seeing-in’, that is, the ability to see things in a marked surface. So, for example, there are some lines on a piece of paper, and I ‘see-in’ those lines a lion, and ‘twofoldness’ is the property possessed by certain marked surfaces of affording the experience of ‘seeing-in’. Wollheim’s description of Ur-painting covers six pages (Wollheim pp.19-25), and Crowther summarizes it as follows: “First, the painter intentionally marks a support using a “charged instrument”; second, as marks are placed, and an unmarked and decreasing area is left, the mark-placing is done with reference to the relation between the marked and unmarked area; third, the painter’s mark-placing also takes account of how the marks relate to the edge of the support; fourth, the painter notices that some marks appear to “coalesce” as wholes or form units or unified groups; fifth, the painter notices that these “motifs” manifest the “seeing-in” phenomenon noted above; and, sixth, all the forgoing aspects converge in some underlying purpose for which the painting is undertaken.” (p. 7) Crowther makes two comments on Wollheim’s conception of Ur-painter. A minor issue is that Wollheim’s third point concerning the marker’s taking account of the edge of the support is historically misplaced, in that the evidence of many millennia of Paleolithic painting shows no concern for the edge; such concern is a late historical development (p. 78 n.11). The major issue for Crowther is that Wollheim’s account under-characterizes the meaning and complexity of each point. He then suggests that “[t]he whole question needs to be approached from a more comprehensive viewpoint,” (p. 7) namely, that offered by Cassirer’s notion of symbolic form.
Now, a striking feature of Crowther’s summary of Ur-painting is that he partly re-interprets, and partly ignores what Wollheim treats as a central feature of any artistic painting, the fundamental procedure of investing painting with meaning that Wollheim calls ‘thematization’. Wollheim initially characterizes thematization as “this process by which the agent abstracts some hitherto unconsidered, hence unintentional aspect, of what he [sic] is doing or what he is working on, and makes the thought of this feature contribute to guiding his future activity.” (Wollheim, p. 20) Thematization is fundamentally and ineliminably teleological; it “is always for an end” and the artist “thematizes in pursuit of a purpose,” namely to add content or meaning to the marked surface (Wollheim p. 21 and p. 22). Wollheim adds that when painting is pursued as an art, the artist’s aim is not only to endow the surface with meaning or content, but also to give and get pleasure; his formulation leaves is uncertain as to whether he thinks that the giving and getting of pleasure is also an aim of thematization. In his book on the philosophy of drawing, Patrick Maynard similarly (but perhaps not identically to Wollheim’s treatment) treats thematization as a central activity, however various its mechanisms and techniques, wherein the artist transforms drawing simpliciter into artistic drawing as part of the project of maximally enriching a drawing and its subject.
If not through thematization, then how does Crowther then conceive the ways in which drawings and paintings acquire meaning and content? In much of Crowther’s accounts of drawing and painting, he does not distinguish features these activities possess simpliciter from further characteristics that the activities possess as art forms. Seemingly even the most basic depictive drawings and paintings possess the rich structure, and even the metaphysical resonances, given in Crowther’s phenomenological accounts. It’s striking that Crowther does not attempt to give a sustained account of how drawings and paintings acquire metaphysical implications, but rather restricts himself to describing the ways that they possess such implications. The variety of verbs that Crowther uses to characterize the relation between marked surface and its primary characteristics on the one hand, and the metaphysical implication on the other, shows this: the way in which drawings and paintings preserve a moment ‘discloses’ deeper truths (p. 105); drawing and painting ‘exemplify’ features and conditions of occupying space (p. 114); drawings and paintings ‘refer back’ to their origins in gesture and handling materials (p. 154). Scattered remarks in the book suggest that Crowther’s is that artistic drawing and painting is strongly continuous with drawing and painting simpliciter (a view to which surely almost everyone would assent), but the chief feature characterizing their practice as art forms is the way in which the artist-marker gives her works a higher degree of consistency, and so gives the product a heightened (open) unity, the effect of which in turn is to afford a relatively richer and more intense experience of the intrinsic fascination that attaches to these kinds of artifacts (see pp. 71-72 for Crowther’s most sustained discussion of this).
Lacking an explicit discussion by Crowther of Wollheim on thematization, I’m unclear on which points and to what extent Crowther might accept ‘thematization’ as indicating the basic features of the creative process wherein an artist creates meaning and content for their work; but perhaps enough has been said to indicate what contribution Crowther’s account might make to the question of ‘extended’ (artistic) media. Crowther would, I think, broadly agree with Wollheim, Maynard, and Lopes that an artistic medium is not individuated solely through the presence of certain materials in putative instances of the medium. Each of these philosophers offers a different account of what constitutes and individuates an artistic medium, in ways that I cannot address here but which seem to me broadly compatible. Crowther’s distinctive applied account here stresses the structural richness of the medium and its typical metaphysical implications. So a rough formula for Crowther’s conception would be: an artistic medium = materials + techniques + complex (visual) structures + metaphysical implication(s). Now, a putative extended medium arises when an artist eliminates one or more of the features of an (unextended) artistic medium, replaces the eliminated feature with one or more non-standard features, but continues to invite and cultivate the kinds of implications, expectations, and evaluations characteristic of the unextended medium. A paradigm of this, again, is the oeuvre of William Kentridge’s animated films, which Kentridge says always originate in the desire to draw, and which in their ‘jumpy’ unfolding from one altered drawing to the next maintain the sense of the discreteness of the individual drawings. What Crowther’s account might contribute here is his sense of artistic media as symbolic forms, and so (always?) accompanied by metaphysical implications. The thought suggests itself that particular metaphysical implications might be present or absent in a particular work of art, and that their (unexpected) presence or absence might be signs of the process of ‘extending’ media. Of course one wants detailed analyses in order to test this suggestion. But in any case, one might well think that with this book Crowther joins Wollheim and Maynard in offering some of the cognitive tools needed to make sense of the seemingly unprecedented products of contemporary art.
--John Rapko
References:
Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (1944)
---The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 1 (1923)
Paul Crowther, What Drawing and Painting Really Mean: The Phenomenology of Image and Gesture (2017)
Patrick Maynard, Drawing Distinctions: The Varieties of Graphic Expression (2005)
Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)