art and allusion

Art as Conceptual - Notes from Session 4 of 7 Ways of Thinking About Art

Notes from Session 4, Seven Ways of Thinking About Art,  Tate Modern

Art as Conceptual

What is conceptual art? There are at least two answers:

1) A post-Duchamp art movement that reached its zenith in the 1960s and 70s. (see Paul Wood Conceptual Art, Tate Publications or Wikipedia article on Conceptual Art with numerous links to conceptual artists' work)

2) Any art that is predominantly idea-based rather than created mainly for aesthetic appreciation. This is the more colloquial sense of the term ‘conceptual art’.
The main focus of this week’s session was on the second of these senses of ‘conceptual art’. In a broader sense, perhaps almost all art has some conceptual element (think of religious art, impressionism, cubism); but only where this dominates do we usually speak of a work as conceptual.

Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades are usually taken to be paradigms of conceptual art (in both senses above) - Fountain (1917) was the start of it all (read Charles Darwent's review of the current Tate Modern exhibition where he discusses this work's modernity). With works such as Mark Wallinger’s A Real Work of Art (a real racehorse that he bought and put into races, but which he declared a work of art by choice of its name which was not meant to be metaphorical), there may be an aesthetic element: but what you see isn’t what you get.

The best explanation of what is going on with conceptual art is given by Arthur Danto (e.g. in his book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace) who wrote about the non-identity of indiscernibles. Just because you can’t tell two objects apart simply by looking at them it doesn’t follow that they express the same emotions, have the same content or meaning. The context and etiology of an object influence its meaing. A urinal on a production line has different proerperties from the urinal that Duchamp dubbed ‘Fountain’, signed R. Mutt and entered for exhibition in 1917.

But how can conceptual art be art? George Dickie’s first version of his Institutional Theory of Art gives one explanation. For him a work of art is an artifact some aspect of which has had the status of ‘candidate for appreciation’ conferred upon it by a member or members of the artworld (by artworld he meant anyone who believed themselves to be part of the artworld, not the social elite of curators, critics, gallery owners, collectors and well-known artists). These provide necessary and sufficient conditions (pre-requisites and guarantees) that anything is a work of art. But this is a neutral sense of ‘art’: to say that something is a work of art implies nothing about its value. On this theory (which has been much criticised for being over-inclusive) it is very easy to see that, for example the minimal intervention of selecting and signing a urinal transforms it into an artifact, and entering it for an exhibition is an act of conferral of status of ‘candidate for appreciation’ (further reading, including criticism of this approach, Nigel Warburton The Art Question, chapter 4).

Two Thoughts

1) What about the status of the Idea in Conceptual Art? A challenge: if the ideas expressed in conceptual art are trite or unoriginal (which they often are) does that make the artwork trite? One possible answer is that the idea is an element of the work of art, not its sole purpose: the ingenuity of the way of communicating the idea is part of the work. This might be supported by the notion that if you want to communicate a complex idea writing a philosophy book or paper is usually better than making a work of conceptual art that is likely to be ignored or misunderstood by gallery goers…

2) Should we approach conceptual art with cynicism or charity? Cynicism involves a starting position that most conceptual art deals in alluding to not very profound thoughts that would be better expressed in straightforward ways, and has limited aesthetic appeal by way of consolation. Charity involves approaching these works in a more open way, starting with the working assumption that there is something worth engaging with there to be discovered. Both approaches have their dangers…

In the Gallery
We looked at the works in Tate Modern  level 5 Idea and Object room 8 Image/Text. In some cases the physical works in front of us were really documents recording the work that had been done. In others, such as Jenny Holzer's piece, the work in front of us was the work of art. Because the idea predominates in all these and the aesthetic response to an object is not a significant part of the experience you might feel that the Tate Modern website linked to above provides just as much experience as the gallery did...

Next week Art as Self-Expressive...

 

 

7 Ways of Thinking About Art: notes from session 3

Marko Daniel's notes from last Monday's session of 7 Ways of Thinking About Art on Art as Curated can be downloaded here as a powerpoint or as a pdf.

7 Ways of Thinking About Art - session 3 Art as Curated

Marko Daniel will be leading the session of 7 Ways of Thinking about Art on Art as Curated on Monday.

A Tate Modern conference 'Museums and Art History' which was webcast here includes some relevant material. The conference focused on the 2006 re-hang of the permanent collection at Tate Modern. My contribution 'Juxtapositions' looks at how new meanings are created by curators. The Tate Modern curator, Frances Morris, who was largely responsible for the re-hang, gave some fascinating insights into how a curator works. To make the webcast work, click on the talk you want to see/hear and then on the 'play' icon on the screen.

If anyone wants to email me notes from your visit  with Marko to the Munoz exhibition next week, then I 'll put these up on this weblog.

Seven Ways of Thinking About Art - Art as Intentional

Week Two: Art as Intentional - session 2 of 'Seven Ways of Thinking About Art'

Tate Modern

This week we looked at the question of how relevant an artist's intentions might be to interpreting a work of art.  I was not attempting to give a conclusive argument in favour of one or other stance, but rather to map out alternatives informed by philosophical aesthetics. 

Anti-Intentionalists see the principal appropriate activity of an art critic/viewer as scrutiny. That is, the viewer looks to see what is there, is not unduly influenced by art historical detail, facts about the artist's life, the subject matter, and so on.

I presented Clive Bell's views in his book Art (1914) as an extreme example. Bell believed that what all art has in common is that it possesses Significant Form. Not all form is significant, but when patterns of lines, shapes and colours (and some depth) combine they can produce an aesthetic emotion in a sensitive viewer. For Bell, we should bring nothing of life to art. All art through ages has achieved its status as art from these formal properties. The emotion they produce, aesthetic emotion, is not characteristic of everyday life. For Bell its power almost certainly came from its potential to put us in touch with the noumenal world (a Kantian term), that is the world of deeper reality that lies behind the veil of everyday appearances and is not usually available to us.

Another famous defence of anti-intentionalism was Wimsatt and Beardsley's famous paper 'The Intentional Fallacy'. ('Fallacy'  in this context is simply an unreliable way of arguing) There they argued that we shouldn't treat the author of a poem as an oracle about its meaning. Rather, readers should focus on the words on the page, and not get embroiled in author psychology. Their main argument was that appeals to authors' intentions were either misleading or unnecessary. If the poem failed to achieve the poet's intentions, then it was misleading to refer to the intentions as the source of its meaning; if the poem did achieve the aims, then appeals to intention were redundant since the meaning was there to be discerned in the poem.

The philosopher Stanley Cavell used a knock-down argument to make the first of these two points:

'...it no more counts towards the success or failure of a work of art that the artist intended something other than is there, than it counts when the referee is counting over a boxer that the boxer had intended to duck' (in 'Music Discomposed').

Difficulties with the anti-intentionalist position include the fact that as Ernst Gombrich often pointed out, there is no innocent eye. Also it is hard to appreciate irony if you don't have some access to the artist's or writer's intentions. Extreme anti-intentionalists would say that to appreciate a Rembrandt self-portrait the fact that the artist intended (if he did) to potray himself ageing, is irrelevant to our appreciaton of it as art - this seems wrong. Subject matter has to be part of some art. It also seems a bit perverse not to find out as much as you possibly can about the circumstances in which a work of art was produced.

For more about Clive Bell and why is theory of art fails, see Chapter One of my book The Art Question. Wimsatt and Beardsley's paper 'The Intentional Fallacy' is reprinted in my book (ed.) Philosophy: Basic Readings, 2nd ed.

In contrast, intentionalists, such as Richard Wollheim, argue that the job of the critic or viewer involves retrieval, retrieval of an artist's intentions, motivations, historical milieu, and so on. Understanding a work of art involves understanding how it came to be as it is. Obviously information is incomplete in many cases, but this does not prevent it from being a worthwhile goal where we do have access to background information. Nor would Wollheim want us to forego spending time looking very closely at the work itself; it is just that the history of how it came to be as it is, its aetiology is important for understanding it.

For more on Intentionalism see Richard Wollheim 'Criticism as Retrieval' supplementary essay in the second ed. of his book Art and Its Objects.

A third position, taken by Jerry Fodor in his article 'It's Deja Vu All Over Again' (a quotation from the accidentally  brilliant Yogi Berra - my favourite quotation of his is 'When you come to a fork in the road, take it') is what might be called Virtual Intentionalism. Here the facts don't matter so much about what the artist's actual intentions were. The point is to try to reconstruct what they might reasonably have been. The artist can't overrule your interpretation here.
Fodor's article is in Danto and His Critics.

Something we didn’t get on to: the question of whether discussion of artist’s intentions implies a misleading picture of what it is to do something intentionally. Many writers in this area describe intentions as if artists had introspectible mental events that are the precursors of and causes of their works. But is this so? What of R.G. Collingwood’s account of art (in his The Principles of Art) where he described the artist as beginning with an inchoate emotion that he or she makes clear to him or herself in the process of producing a work of art. On that picture (which rings true with many artists), the idea that an artist has a clear intention that precedes the creation of the artwork is implausible in most cases.

7 Ways of Thinking About Art - Week One

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