Week One: Art as Thought-Provoking
The main focus of this week’s session of Seven Ways of Thinking About Art was the tension between treating works of art as catalysts for subjective musing and the idea that they might have definite objective meanings. I presented these two approaches as at opposite ends of a scale, though these may not be mutually exclusive.
We began by looking at an inkblot image that was open to many different interepretations. Some people saw seahorses in it, others a cross-section of a brain, or a crocodile's head. When I revealed that the image was not a genuine Rorshach test image, but rather one of Andy Warhol's series of Rorshach images, this again caused people to see it differently. This raised questions about the degree to which understanding art is a matter of projective understanding - in the sense that there is 'more to seeing than meets the eyeball' (as N.R. Hanson put it). Our expectations and pre-occupations (our 'mental set' as Gombrich called it) influence what we see and think.
In the gallery we looked at Donald Judd’s ‘Untitled, 1972’, a large open-topped box made of copper and painted with a red cadmium bottom that is reflected in the internal sides of the piece. Judd’s work is declared to be about the material objects themselves, and is expressly not meant to evoke personal reflections (certainly that is the impression given by the captioning in Tate Modern: Judd’s art is not about representation or metaphor or suggestion, but rather presents the formed material objects themselves). If you want to learn more about Judd and his art, there is an interesting series of short webcasts made by Nicholas Serota on the Tate Modern Website (you will need RealPlayer to listen to and watch these, but they work well on a modem connection as well as broadband). There is also a transcript of Serota's piece on the work we looked at below the image of 'Untitled, 1972' here.
Yet the photographer Thomas Demand’s written reaction to the work (currently placed in the gallery next to the main caption in the 'Bigger Picture' series) is deliberately personal and subjective, describing the images the work evokes for him, well aware that this was not the sort of response that Judd would have hoped for...
Viewers of Joseph Beuys’ ‘The Pack’ 1969 in our group last night reacted in a variety of ways from feeling unmoved by the piece, wondering how all the sledges fitted into the VW van, seeing it as about rescue, to the more autobiographic reaction of being reminded of expeditions. Yet for Beuys there were very specific meanings attached to the content of this installation: the animal fat and neat rolls of felt on sledges allude to his alleged experience after a plane crash in the Crimea during World War Two when he was saved by Tartars who covered him in fat and wrapped him in felt. Although this story has been shown to be a fiction, it created a myth in which the materials of fat and felt became symbols with definite meanings, as is evident to anyone who has seen a range of his work. This is how Beuys put it (listen to Beuys saying this here on track 5):
“I didn’t take these stuffs only as a kind of immediately dramatic stuff because I was in a dramatic situation in the war, no, not at all. I wasn’t interested to take such things. But later on, when I built up a kind of theory and a system of sculpture and art and also a system of wider understanding – anthropological understanding of sculpture being related to the social body and to everybody’s life and ability - then such materials seemed to be right and effective tools to overcome, one could say, the wound of us.”
Once you know the key to his use of these symbols it is relatively easy to unlock this kind of meaning (which then may have a wider significance than Beuys’ personal myth, perhaps lined to care,compassion and nurturing). Without the key, it is just not possible to read off Beuys’ meaning, and we would be left with the personal reactions. One of the questions that was raised last night was whether the purely subjective and uninformed reaction to a work such as this has value; whether it is an appropriate and adequate response to a work of art.
The dangers of relying entirely on the reactions of someone uninformed about the original context of the work, the artists’ actual or presumed intentions, the rest of the artist’s oeuvre, and so on, is that the viewer may not truly appreciate what is front of him or her (particularly if you believe that there is more to seeing than meets the eyeball). It can result in a kind of aestheticism that relies heavily on an appreciation of visual beauty and form, often at the expense of other features of the work. On the other hand, many people derive great pleasure and interest from their subjective musings inspired by works of art (and perhaps having as their main source what the viewer brings to the work rather than what pre-exists in the work). It is even possible that most gallery goers treat works there in more or less this way…
Next week we will building on this discussion, focussing on how much weight to give to artists’ intentions as presented in their manifestos, interviews and other writing (which are always made in a particular historical and artistic context) and whether it even makes sense to say that we can know an artist’s intentions. If you want to think about this before next week, this entry on The Intentional Fallacy is a good place to start.
If you have mislaid the Course Aims handout you can download it here:Download 7 Ways Handout.2008.doc
More General Notes
My previous post on the Experience of Teaching at Tate Modern
If you are interested in the general question 'What is Philosophy?' (itself a philosophical question), here are some suggestions: my short answer to this question.
Audio interviews (these should start playing a few seconds after you click on the link. You can also download them as MP3s by 'right clicking' or 'control clicking' on a Mac):
Interview with Edward Craig on 'What is Philosophy?'
Interview with Jonathan Reé on Philosophy as an Art
Interview with Alain de Botton on Philosophy Within and Outside the Academy
Interview with Mary Warnock on Philosophy in Public Life
(these are all from the Philosophy Bites podcast series of interviews with philosophers - these are available here or from iTunes) or you can subscribe to the RSS feed here.
You might also be interested in my Philosophy weblog Virtual Philosopher
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