Critical Remarks on Paul Crowther’s What Drawing and Painting Really Mean (2017)
One mark of an individual historical period in the arts is that a period is characterized not just by certain styles, but also by the prominence of certain questions. One question that accompanies Modern art is the question ‘Is photography an art?’, and a sign that Modern art comes by an end by around 1970 is the loss of interest in that question, and the concomitant failure of visual artists using video technology to induce the new question ‘Is video an art?’ It is characteristic of the artistic period succeeding Modern art, our period of post-modern or Contemporary art, that such questions of whether such-and-such novel kind of image-making is an art arouse no interest. Our contemporary artistic commonplace is ‘Anything can be a work of art’, and so videos can too. A characteristic question of Contemporary art is rather ‘Is painting dead?’, a question to which affirmative and negative answers flow as regularly as the tides. The fact that no one asks whether sculpture is dead indicates that suggests that painting is questioned because of its status as the leading medium of artistic experimentation and progress in Modern art. The less frequently asked ‘Is drawing important?’ perhaps responds to a different concern, the so-called ‘de-skilling’ in the Contemporary visual arts and the prominence of Conceptual art. In a great range of Conceptual art the foci are artistic interest are the artist’s conceptualizations, wherein the artist’s handling of the materials is conceived as the mere execution of a notionally prior program; as in for example Sol LeWitt’s drawings, the actual making of the physical drawing is just a strictly rule-governed following of the artist’s instructions. In the reign of Conceptual art, painting and drawing are neither artistically living nor interesting.
A second line of thinking marking Contemporary art suggests that under contemporary conditions traditional art forms and artistic media are neither living nor dead, but rather expanded. The notion of an expanded artistic medium perhaps owes something to Rosalind Krauss’s canonical essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, wherein she argued that advanced sculpture on the 1960s and 1970s is rightly understood not primarily as an internal development of Modern sculpture, but rather as a novel artistic activity whose conceptual foundation is a quasi-logical grid determined by concepts of landscape and architecture, and their opposites not-landscape and not-architecture. She further asserts that sculpture after Modern art, or rather ‘the term ‘sculpture’’, is now only one term among three others designating novel kinds of artistic activity, ‘site-construction’, ‘marked sites’, and ‘axiomatic structures’. These four terms collectively constitute “a universe of terms that are felt to be in opposition within a cultural situation.” (Krauss p.41) Krauss’s argument is difficult and obscure, and marred by a crude polemic against a straw man of ‘historicism’; but her proposal if nothing else resonates with an aspect of nascent Contemporary art that Theodor Adorno described already in 1967: “In recent times the boundaries between the different arts have become fluid, or, more accurately, their demarcation lines have been eroded.” (Adorno p.368) So one starts to have painting as a kind of theater that further expands and alters theater, or sculpture as a kind of dance that makes dance sculptural. Painting as theater might be one form of ‘expanded painting’, along with the more easily grasped expansions characteristic of late Modern art, such as painting with traditional materials in a non-traditional way (such as shooting paint at a canvas), or using non-traditional or hitherto unaccredited materials and instruments (such as dipping one’s hair into tar and applying paint with movements of the neck).
So traditional art forms such as painting and drawing have ‘expanded’ in varying ways in Contemporary art to the point where it is unclear whether it is even fruitful to treat them as distinctive ways of art-making. And this resultant uncertainty as to whether painting is a distinctive, individual kind of artistic activity co-exists with the wide latitude in Contemporary art for artistic self-characterization and novel stipulations of the content and appropriate reception of art works; if an artist blows into the wind and declares it a kind of artistic painting, who is to say otherwise? And even prior to Contemporary art there was no consensus as to what individuates different art kinds from each other, nor indeed which art kind(s) are most relevant for the evaluation of any particular work; as Dominic Lopes notes, there are several kinds of kinds of art—genres, styles, traditions, oeuvres, etc.,--and so it not obvious in any case whether, say, the work is best considered first of all as an artistic painting, or a religious painting, or a mid-career work of Rembrandt’s.
Perhaps the most prominent philosophical response to these concerns is given in Kendall Walton’s essay ‘Categories of Art’, wherein Walton argues that the ‘right’ classification of a work of art plays an essential role in judging the work. As Walton’s essay is complex and the subject of a large secondary literature, I only note here that on his account we cannot so much as be aware of an artwork’s full range of aesthetic properties without having classified the work rightly; for some of the work’s properties are not directly perceivable, and right categorization leads us to grasp some of those properties themselves, as well as aiding us understanding whether each and every of the work’s properties, whether latent or manifest, are standard or non-standard. Applied to a Contemporary work in an ‘expanded’ medium, the essay’s account helps enlighten us, say, as to what sort of non-standard role blowing into the wind might play in a painting. The absence of artistic classifications of genre and medium would then not free the work for unbiased consideration, but rather only allow the presentation of a mutilated and unintelligible slice of the work.
Paul Crowther’s recent book, What Drawing and Painting Really Mean, is, like so much of his work, an important contribution to philosophical reflection on issues in Modern and Contemporary arts. Here, as in other of his books of the past two decades, he treats art forms most fundamentally as ways in which human beings represent, express, and realize themselves as fundamentally embodied, spatially and temporally located, and self-conscious beings. Crowther first treats drawing and painting together as sharing some basic features of self-conscious beings, and then differentiating them as expressing different aspects of how human beings realize themselves in space. The primitive feature shared by drawing and painting is that both constitutively involve marking a surface (pp. 48-57). Following an opening discussion of the role of images and image-making in the cognition of self-conscious beings, Crowther then, in the core of the book, chapters 2-4, interrogates and explicates at length this proto-action of (a) marking (b) a surface. ‘Marking’ is first of all a human gesture. This means that any marking, and so any drawing and painting, exhibits ‘style’. Marking, and with it style, is a spontaneous activity that conveys something of the sense of the marker’s imaginative and deliberative character, and the fact that the result of the mark is stabilized makes the artist’s imagination accessible to others. This stable accessibility is fundamentally spatial. Crowther calls this quality of pictorial marking drawing’s and painting’s ‘autographic’ quality. Not only does this autographic quality convey something of the marker’s imagination to an audience, but it allows the marker to observe their own imagination, and so both to recruit marking into the process of self-understanding, and to develop their own imagination through further marking. Maximally, the marker’s further elaboration yields two remarkable results: the process and its results are intrinsically fascinating, and out of this, and the pleasure that others take in observing and engaging with this, arise the arts of painting and drawing; and the artist comes to develop, observe, and understand their style to the extent that the artist can “inhabit [italics in the original] his or her own style.” (p. 27)
The latter element of the term ‘marking a surface’ likewise carries the implication of fundamental spatiality, and the marker’s use of a surface opens up the possibility of the possibility of drawing and painting as fundamentally spatial arts. As famously described by the painter Hans Hofmann, a marked surface induces the sense of figure-ground relations, proto-typically the sense that the marks constitute a bounded figure that is ‘closer’ to the viewer than the background invoked by the surface’s unmarked areas. Further, as Rudolf Arnheim explicated, figural markings on surfaces typically convey a range of qualities and dynamic qualities, such as zigzag lines invoking simultaneously the proto-geometric sense of angles and the dynamic sense of movement. Crowther draws out further consequences from basic features, the most important of which for his account is the way in which the marks and the surface tend to cohere into what he calls an ‘open unity’ (p. 29 and passim). The unity that a drawing or painting exhibits emerges from marking, and so each mark is perceived as related to all the other marks in the work. As fundamentally spatial artifacts, drawings and paintings are in a sense present as a whole, and can be explored in any order and at any distance. Since marks are fundamentally gestural expressions, part of what there is to be seen in a drawing or painting is the “gestural conditions of emergence.” (ibid)
Up to this point in the order of explication there would be, I suspect, broad agreement with Crowther’s account, at least among those who would grant his claims that there are basic features shared by drawing and painting and that these features carry a range of basic meanings. But the most distinctive and innovative, and so perhaps controversial, aspects of his work stem from his further insistence that these features carry “broader metaphysical implications.” (p. 3) Crowther tries to explicate these implications with two conceptual moves. First, he insists that drawing and painting should be interpreted as instances of ‘symbolic forms’, a conception introduced and developed by the philosopher Ernst Cassirer in the first half of the twentieth century. In Crowther’s words, symbolic forms are “logically distinctive modes of reference that can be developed creatively under different historical and cultural circumstances . . . Symbolic forms transcend mere semantics to exemplify different ways in which humanity inhabits Being.” (ibid) Symbolic forms are individuated by their distinctive ways in which they embody and articulate basic features of human embodiment, cognition, and communication. Whereas Cassirer differentiates symbolic forms broadly as comprising language, myth, religion, art, and science, Crowther treats the individual art forms of drawing and painting as distinctive symbolic forms, each with its distinctive way of ‘inhabiting Being’. Second, Crowther argues that drawing and painting (and perhaps all the arts) attain the status of symbolic forms by creating distinctive sorts of ‘aesthetic spaces’. Crowther devotes chapter 4 to a complex and detailed discussion of the concept of aesthetic space. Put quite crudely (here, though not in the book), aesthetic space arises from the application the imagination to perception. Imagination is the human capacity to evoke ‘elsewheres’, something beyond what is given directly to perception. So the sense of the past, the sense of the future, and the sense of other aspects and dimensions of what is perceptually evident, these senses of elsewheres and elsewhens are all the products of imagination. Evoking elsewheres carries the sense of spontaneity, as in exercising the imagination one is not rigidly bound by what one perceives, and so by implication with a kind of withdrawal from a narrowly pragmatic attitude towards life, the ‘disinterestedness’ that Kant attributed to aesthetic judgments.
If drawing and painting share all these features, how then do they differ? The differences turn unsurprisingly on the different ways in which marks are characteristically made in drawing and painting, and on the characteristically different effects. (pp. 63-68) Drawing uses a solid instrument, the immediate result of which is a dot or a line, and which in sustained use figures and patterns across the surface while leaving much of the surface unmarked. Painting deposits pigment, the immediate result of which is a colored area, and when sustained covers the surface and produces the ‘push/pull’ spatial dynamics mentioned above. Again, more startling are Crowther’s accounts of the distinctive metaphysical resonances of the two activities. Drawing carries the sense of the pressure that the instrument applies to the surface: “Always with drawing, there is the shadow of incision.” Crowther interprets this as immediately exemplifying “spirit’s breaking open of the physical to transform itself into a more public and enduring mode of expression.” (p. 66) By contrast, painting, in its juxtaposition of colored patches, bears a range of distinctive meanings, particularly a more evocative and complete sense of light than drawing permits. Painting’s heightening of the push/pull dimension of pictorial space “creates a level of virtual animation” [italics in the original] involving a sense of the ways in which animacy, the sense of being alive, pervades our world; and since we ourselves share in this life, painting evokes “a sense of the world answering back to our immersion in it, at the level of basic space-experience.” (p. 64, italics in the original).
So on Crowther’s account drawing and painting are symbolic forms wherein someone exercises their imagination in marking a surface in such a way as to create an aesthetic space, which is in turn the object of intrinsic fascination and the occasion of a distinctive pleasure. In and through this imaginative activity the marker creates, expresses, and stabilizes for the perception of others a distinctive articulation of human beings’ relationship to the basic conditions of their existence, especially their existence as embodied, temporal, and spatial beings. Painting and drawing bear a range of metaphysical meanings, both in what they share and in their distinctiveness. In a maximal summary of this, Crowther goes so far as to say that drawing and painting “celebrate [all] this,” and that the marker’s aesthetic space “discloses the fecundity of spatial Being as such.” (p. 101) Having given his core accounts, Crowther goes on to discuss in successive chapters the metaphysical meanings that arise from the fact that drawings and paintings seem to stabilize the sense of a single moment apart from the marker’s constructive activity, the nature of abstract art, and the distinctive features of drawing and painting with computers. But the questions arise: How plausible and illuminating is Crowther’s account? How does it compare with competing accounts? And does it contribute to the clarification of the issues surrounded the ‘expanded media’ of Contemporary art? I will attempt to address these questions in the forthcoming second part of this blog post.
References:
Theodor Adorno, “Art and the Arts” (1967) in Can One Live after Auschwitz? (2003)
Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (1974)
Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (1944)
---The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 1 (1923)
Paul Crowther, What Drawing and Painting Really Mean: The Phenomenology of Image and Gesture (2017)
Hans Hofmann, Search for the Real: and other essays (1967)
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790)
Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (1979) in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (1983)
Dominic McIver Lopes, Beyond Art (2014)
Kendall Walton, “Categories of Art” (1970) in Marvelous Images: On Values and the Arts (2008)