art and allusion

Notes from Session 6 of Modern Aesthetics (Tate Modern)

Modern Aesthetics, a course at Tate Modern. Notes from the final session. Martin Heidegger 'The Origin of the Work of Art', a shortened version of which is reading 30 in the set book.

This is the toughest and in some ways the strangest of the readings we have looked at in this course. 

Heidegger's essay is about 'the thinglyness of things' and about how art is 'the setting-into-work of truth' (p.357). But what can that possibly mean? Here's my take.

We concentrated on Heidegger's tripartite distinction between an object like a stone which is 'worldless' (meaning something like it is not part of a community's shared human understanding), a piece of equipment (i.e. anything shaped for human use - the material vanishes as it is transformed into equipment, something we can use rather than just a self-contained part of the natural world), and the work of art (which Heidegger believes can reveal or 'unconceal' truth and actually create a world).

 Van Gogh's painting of a well-worn pair of boots that Heidegger takes to belong to a peasant woman (but Meyer Schapiro claimed were the artist's own boots), provides Heidegger with a pretext for a passage of purple prose in which he imagines  a somewhat romanticized version of the world of the peasant woman via the image of the boots. (Hints of the Nazi obsession with national soil are left in here, but I suspect in a much toned down version from the original 1930s lectures on which this essay was based. Heidegger was an enthusiastic Nazi in the 1930s).

The painting (actually there are at least two candidates here - two paintings from the 1880s of boots - Google 'Van Gogh's Boots' to see what I mean) discloses the equipmentality of equipment, in Heidegger's jargon, which roughly means that by looking at the painting we are jolted in to a different kind of understanding of the nature of the objects that form part of a human being's world. The boots themselves (the 'equipment' here) wouldn't produce this effect. As Heidegger puts it in his strangely contorted and often wilfully obscure language: 

 'Van Gogh's painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth This entity emerges in to the unconcealedness of its being.'

The truth that Heidegger believes art can reveal is not the truth of correspondence to facts, but rather a truth about the fundamental being of the subject of the art. Unlike merely useful objects (equipment), a work of art is self-contained, like a natural object. So for Heidegger (a bit like for Schopenhauer) art can put us in touch with reality in a special way, a way that produces an almost mystical new awakening about the world as it is rather than the world shaped by our pre-existing notions of what we expect to find, or of our desire to turn the earth into a world that we can use through its equipmental relation to us.

In the gallery we looked at works in the Arte Povera and Anti-Form hub in Tate Modern Level 5 East. For these works at least, what we extracted from the thicket of Heidegger's prose gave some insights into the particular pieces. For example, Barry Flanagan's work (he of the leaping hares) No 5, 1971, can be read as playing with ideas about equipmentality, the sharpened sticks are transformed from earth to an implied world, the rope and the fabric too and the careful arrangement of parts all contribute to a work that is both familiar, because it is so human in its transformation of the world, but also somewhat mysterious, in that it clearly has no purpose (it's not a dwelling, or a trap or a funeral pyre). Penone's Tree of 12 metres, took a huge sleeper-like rough-hewn piece of wood and re-discovered a moment of a younger tree within it through carving back, following the knots, and producing a totem like inner tree. The rough-hewn piece of wood was a piece of equipment within which Penone uncovered the beauty of the natural tree. Through the art, truth (in Heidegger's sense) about our relationship to the earth and the process of making a world for oursleves could be said to be uncovered. 

By the way, if you want to read Being and Time (Heidegger's major philosophical work), Hubert Dreyfus of U.C. Berkeley has a full podcast lecture course of over 20 lectures (free) on iTunesU in the UC Berkeley, Philosophy section. It is course Philosophy 185. This link to his first lecture might work if you have iTunes loaded. Poor sound quality, no editing etc., but Dreyfus is renowned as one of the clearer expositors of a notoriously difficult thinker.

The next Tate Modern course, Contemporary Aesthetics, is already sold out I'm afraid, but there is a waiting list in case some people pull out. Look out for a new course, probably on the senses, in Spring 2011...details will be on the Tate Modern site.

 I'm teaching a course on Free Speech in the Autumn in association with English PEN - some details here. Booking will open tomorrow (July 14th) c/o The Bishopsgate Institute - only 18 places though.

Free Speech Course - in association with English PEN - Autumn 2010

I'll be teaching a 6-session course on Free Speech on Tuesday evenings this Autumn. Further details here. This course is in association with English PEN and is organised by the Bishopsgate Institute.

Notes from Session 5 of Modern Aesthetics (Tate Modern): Walter Benjamin

The topic of this week's session of the Tate Modern course Modern Aesthetics was Walter Benjamin's famous and remarkably prescient essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'. At the core of this is the idea that the comparatively new technology (he was writing in the 1930s) of photography had actually transformed the nature of art, democratizing it, moving it from the realm of ritual to the everyday. Benjamin, who committed suicide in 1940 while fleeing the Nazis, was passionately anti-fascist. In photography he saw the possibility of a democratic alternative to the aestheticization of politics characteristic of fascism: namely a politicization of aesthetics. In complete contrast with a thinker like Clive Bell, Benjamin saw that the art of his age could be intimately connected with the realities of daily life. Art for art's sake was the antithesis of what Benjamin stood for.

'That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura'. The aura of an original painting stems from its uniqueness - the fact that it is an object with a particular history, perhaps including wear and tear, different ownership and so on. True, students have always painted copies of great paintings, and the printing press brought about significant changes too (William M. Ivins jr. has written brilliantly on this in Prints and Visual Communication ), but photographic reproduction has opened up new possibilities of automation and multiplication of images. Images can be viewed in different contexts, and by different people. Images that could once only be viewed by a rich elite, could be owned in reproduction by almost anyone. For Benjamin there could be no such thing as an authentic photographic print [for a discussion of whether there is a meaningful sense of 'Authentic' in the realm of photographic art, including the notion of a 'vintage print' see Nigel Warburton 'Authentic Photographs', British Journal of Aesthetics, 1997]

In the galleries we visited two rooms of the Exposed exhibition - Rooms 1 and 4. Philip-Lorca diCorcia's large candid photographs of people in Times Square have some of the presence of a conventional painting, both in terms of their scale and Caravaggio-esque lighting (there are moral issues too raised by these - some people don't want their images to be used in this way). A small reproduction does not communicate their effect. They exist as physical gallery pieces, albeit intrinsically reproducible. To some extent they have the aura of an original painting and much is lost in postcard reproduction. This contrasts with the framed press celebrity photographs in Room 4. Despite being in an art museum, most of these might equally have been viewed in a book or magazine. There was no notion that we were looking at an 'original' image of which others were derivative. If Benjamin is right about the withering of aura in the age of mechanical reproduction, this may vary still from image to image. Not every photographic print of an image has equal status...

The invention of digital photography and the new online modes of dissemination, sharing and copying of images puts us in a new world of technological change. Perhaps, even more than in Benjamin's day, we are living through a period of technological change in which our attitudes to images will be transformed irrevocably. The ease and speed with which pictures can be located, copied and used today (ease of performance - copyright restrictions are a practical obstacle in this respect) is exhilarating. New modes of visual communication are opening up. Indeed, re-reading Benjamin today is a very different experience from reading him a decade ago...

From a victim of Nazism, to a Nazi: next week Heidegger...brace yourselves...

Notes from Session 4 of Modern Aesthetics (Tate Modern) R.G. Collingwood

For week 4 of the Tate Modern Modern Aesthetics course we focussed on R.G.Collingwood's theory of art as set out in his book The Principles of Art (1938) (see reading 26 of Cahn and Meskin - the course set book).

[For a more general introduction to questions about the definition of art, listen to my interview with Derek Matravers from the Philosophy Bites podcast series.]

For Collingwood, the artist - whether a poet or a painter - tells his or her audience 'the secrets of their own hearts' (p.336). The artist expresses an emotion, that is takes it from the stage of inchoate feeling to expressed and clarified emotion. The process of designing while making makes the nature of the emotion more precise:

'Until a man has expressed his emotion, he does not yet know what it is.'

and the artist proper is

' ...a person who, graplling with the problem of expressing a certain emotion, says 'I want to get this clear'. (p.114)

The audience in appreciating the work of art comes to express their own emotion in reaction to the work in a kind of recapitulation of the process the artist has gone through.

There aren't blueprints in art, nor is art simply a matter of technique (though he acknowledges that you need some technique to create anything). Art isn't a matter of knowing what you want to create then finding the best means to achieve that end; rather it is a process of dicscovery, of self-discovery that ultimately aids the viewer's self-discovery. In part this may be achieved by an appreciation of tactile values - the imaginative physical engagement through small body movements with the brushstrokes, or carving marks, or shapes in a picture of sculpture (an idea that Collingwood borrowed from the connoisseur Bernard Berenson).

In contrast various kinds of 'art so-called' such as magical art are means/ends directed. Magical art evokes emotions that have a practical use in life. Examples include  propaganda art , religious art or patriotic art. None of these count as genuine art for Collingwood. Nor is Amusement Art. This is skilfully constructed to evoke a particular kind of emotion, a preconceived effect. Again, this is a craft. Think of Hitchcock's film Psycho (not Collingwood's example) and the ways in which Hitchcock skilfully and knowingly evokes fear in his audience through a range of techniques surrounding the famous shower scene. This is a real end-directed craft.

Real art, 'art proper', turns the audience into artists in that they engage in the same imaginative activity of making their emotions precise. Collingwood cites Coleridge approvingly:

'we know a man for a poet by the fact that he makes us poets'

In discussion it became apparent that some people thought this an outmoded and romantic approach to art; others acknowledged that this is close to how many gallery goers understand art.

In the gallery we looked at works in on Level 3 East of Tate Modern, and particularly the works in this room. Many of these are self-consciously expressionistic - if the theory doesn't work for these it won't work for any art. Approaching these works from a viewpoint of expressed emotion produced a different kind of attention that very much reflected back on the concerns of the artist producing the work, in contrast with Clive Bell's approach (examined last week), which was almost entirely concerned with the effect on the viewer.

Next week, reading 29 Walter Benjamin 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'

Further Reading on R.G. Colingwood
Nigel Warburton, The Art Question, chapter 2.
Aaron Ridley R.G. Collingwood

Notes from Session 3 of Modern Aesthetics (Tate Modern)

Clive Bell's theory of Significant Form was the focus of this week's session of Modern Aesthetics. Bell, whose polemic Art was published in 1914, was a passionate advocate of Post-Impression. He did  what Tolstoy described (on p.234 of the set book) namely worked backwards from art that a certain class approved of to a theory of what all art must be, though whether Tolstoy was right to be so dismissive of taking intuitions seriously is another matter (in politics John Rawls advocated what he called 'reflective equilibrium' moving to and fro between intuitions and theory).

For Bell it is obvious that art must have a common essence - something that makes all works of art art. If not, then when we talk about art, we simply gibber, he declares. The defining quality of art is Significant Form i.e. patterns of lines, shapes and colour (and he allows some depth) that give rise to a distinctive emotion felt only in the presence of art, namely the Aesthetic Emotion.

The beauty of a butterfly's wing is different from the beauty in art, he tells us (Sebastian, a character in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisiteddisagreed absolutely with this - how do we say who is right?). To appreciate art we need bring nothing of life - art is a separate realm that has the power to move the sensitive viewer. Most controversially, he maintains that what is represented in representational art has no bearing on it as art. Art is timeless - the same qualities in ancient art move us today. Past artists move us for the same reason that present day ones do. We don't need to know art history to appreciate art as art. The main instruments needed are good eyes and sensitivity. Objects all around us stand charged with this power to affect us.

His is a theory that approaches art very much from the stance of the spectator (in contrast with R.G. Collingwood's creator-centred approach which we will be studying next week - Collingwood turns the viewer into a kind of creator).

Bell's theory is unashamedly subjective in that it begins with personal experience of the Aesthetic Emotion. That is the way we can tell that a work is a work of art. There is no criterion apart from this for discerning between mere form (everything has this in some sense) and Significant Form. In the section of his book called the Metaphysical Hypothesis Bell suggests that the reason Significant Form has such power to move us is that it gives us a glimpse of how the world really is, the world behind the veil of appearances (a view that mirrors Schopenahauer's account of music).

As a theory of what art is, Bell's is open to numerous objections (I outline some of these in the first chapter of my book The Art Question ). For instance, defining art in terms of Significant Form and Significant Form in terms of the Aesthetic Emotion is highly uninformative - it is a viciously circular defnition because we have no independent criteria for identifying either of these things.

More directly, for most of us, the fact that Rembrandt's self-portraits are depictions of the artist is a relevant factor when assessing these as art (on Bell's account, what is represented is not relevant) - true, formal properties are relevant too, but it is going too far to discount representation altogether.

Similarly we might not even understand what an artist was trying to do if we know nothing of the history of the period and, in many cases, of the artist's other work, and expressed intentions. This does not mean that the artist's expressed views fully determine what a work of art means.

D.H. Lawrence (himself a painter as well as a writer) was scathing about the formalists' quasi-religious attitude towards Significant Form: He lampooned it in an essay about painting: 'I am Significant Form and my unutterable name is Reality. Lo, I am Form and I am Pure, behold I am Pure Form. I am the revelation of Spiritual Life, moving behind the veil. I come forth and make myself known, and I am Pure Form, behold I am Significant Form....Lift up your eyes to Significant Form, and be saved.'

In the gallery we looked at works in the room 'After Impressoinism', relating them to Bell's theory. While approaching these as Bell might have done did give some insights, in almost every case important elements seemed to be omitted, including the question of how the work observed related to other works by that artist, and the historical context in which the work was produced and might have been a reaction to. For Bell these considerations would have been simply irrelevant to appreciating the works as art.

Searching for Meaning in Tate Modern

I'll be speaking about searching for meaning in Tate Modern in this one-day conference on Art, Philosophy and Humanism organised by the British Humanists Association, Conway Hall, 26th June, 2010.

Notes on Session 2 of Modern Aesthetics - Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche in his first book, The Birth Of Tragedy (1872), suggested that art was what made life endurable and creative for the ancient Greeks who were fundamentally pessimists [Listen to a podcast interview on Nietzsche on Art] [If you have trouble listening to this, you can get it from the podcast series 'Philosophy Bites' on iTunes] Without their great art of tragedy, the Greeks would have been lost, Nietzsche believed. Dionysus was the god of intoxification and frenzy; Apollo represented order,  beauty, illusion, dream, the prinicipium individuationis (division into individuals). Too much awareness of the Dionysian aspect of life would be unendurable. The combination of the musical theatre with the enactment of taboos that tragedy provided allow sufficient engagement with the Dionysian aspects of life while at the same time tempering it with Apollonian elements for the Greeks to emerge invigorated from experience. A predominantly Dionysiac art that acknowledges the death and terror at the heart of existence, but does not teeter into the abyss, allows viewers to experience a kind of solidarity and power that renews the spirit.

Nietzsche (influenced by Schopenhauer) believed (or feigned to believe) that at a deep level reality is simply a seething mass that is completely impersonal. Great art can give us a glimpse of that reality without destroying us. The Dionysian element in art is essential to its profundity, but without some Apollonian element the art would be too dark to endure.

In the Gallery

This week we were in of Tate Britain. There was a marked contrast between the apparently Apollonian work in 19 and the more Dionysiac in 21. The direct visible physical gestures in, for example Peter Lanyon's painting suggested the loss of sense of self-consciousness and a more direct expressive force than did the cooler work by Mondrian...But nothing there was completely Dionysian, there was always the sense that an artist was in control of the final result rather than simply in a frenzy.

Thomas Demand - Absence and Presence

You can listen to an 18 minute talk I gave on the work of the artist Thomas Demand at a recent Tate Modern conference 'Agency and Automatism' here (click on the bar below and it should start to play after a few seconds):

Nigel Warburton on Thomas Demand

You can view the image 'Corridor' that I discuss here. 

Watch a video with Thomas Demand talking about his images of the Oval Office in the White House

Modern Aesthetics, Tate Modern, 2010, notes from Session One

Modern Aesthetics, Tate Modern, session one.

We focused on Arthur Schopenhauer (reading 19 from the set book Cahn and Meskin eds Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology - this reading gets much easier to understand from section 34 - don't be put off by the daunting opening).

Schopenhauer is much-loved by artists, writers and lovers of art because, unlike most thinkers, he put art and our experience of it at the heart of his philosophy. His main work, The World as Will and Representation (first published 1819, sometimes translated as The World as Will and Idea) is, like most philosophy about appearance and reality. You can listen to a podcast I made about Schopenhauer here. This is based on a chapter from my book Philosophy: The Classics.

Key Terms

The Will (with a capital 'W') is the ultimate source of everything, the undifferentiated life energy that is behind every appearance. This is the true nature of the world - it is all Will.

The world we experience most of the time is the world as Representation. This is our experience of individual things, of what he calls objectification of the Will. This representation comes in different grades, different levels of removal from the Will.

Platonic Ideas are outside of space and time and are what Schopenhauer calls direct objectifications of the Will. [Those of you who didn't take Classic Aesthetics might want to look at notes on Plato on the Forms or Ideas here and follow some of the links. Basically Plato believed that reality consists of these abstract entities - the chair you see is an imperfect copy of the abstract idea of a chair. If you find that hard to believe, think of how any real circle is always an imperfect representation of the Idea of a circle which has no imperfections. Plato famously denigrated mimetic or representational art because it was at several removes from reality - a picture of a chair is a representation of a representation, and not reliable about the Idea.]

'will' with a lower case 'w' is desire. Part of Schopenhauer's pessimistic outlook is that he believes that our desires, even when fulfilled, lead to further desires and that we are for the most part in torment constantly striving for things. The experience of art can give us temporary relief from this suffering, but is more important than this because it becomes a kind of metaphysics, particularly when the art in question is music.

[Click on the red text below to read the rest of these notes on Session One]

Handout for Modern Aesthetics Course

You can download the handout for the 2010 Tate Modern Aesthetics course (by ticket only, sold out) here: 

Download Modern Aesthetics Handout 

I'll be putting notes on this weblog after every session.

This is the set book: