art and allusion

Podcast interview with Derek Matravers on What is Art?

I recently interviewed Derek Matravers, author of Art and Emotion for the series Philosophy Bites.

Listen to interview with Derek Matravers on the topic What is Art? (12.50)

Philip Jones Griffiths has died

Magnum photographer, Philip Jones Griffiths, one of the great war photographers of the Twentieth Century, has died (19th Feb. 2008). He is best known for his book Vietnam Inc., an angry protest against inhumanity, which epitomises the power of photojournalism to combine documentary recording with a subjective stance. You can watch and listen to an excellent Magnum in Motion podcast 'Vietnam' that shows and discusses some of this work. Watch this if you are unsure why he was such a great photographer and why his work was so valued.

His 1996 retrospective book was appropriately named Dark Odyssey. Stuart Franklin, the current president of Magnum wrote:

'It was Philip's consummate skill as a picture maker, carefully able to draw the viewer closer and closer to his subjects through his emotionally-charged compositions that lent such power to his work.  Philip was always concerned with individuals - their personal and intimate suffering more than any particular class or ideological struggle.'

Jones Griffiths' own words:

'My tools as a photographer are different to other reporters. I don't have the time or space they have to go into context; my images speak alone, which can be a problem. But all journalists share two concerns: first, for truth; second, for the suffering of innocents. No man can see what I've seen and not be moved to tell others about it.'

Read a tribute by Stuart Franklin (includes a slideshow and useful links)

Reliable Biographical Information from Magnum site, with slideshow

Watch a series of QuickTime interview clips with Philip Jones Griffiths

Read New York Times Obituary

Read Obituary by Amanda Hopkinson in The Guardian

An interview and another interview

A selection of his best known photographs

7 Ways of Thinking About Art - Art as Iconic

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

The topic of this session was art as iconic, not in C.S.Peirce's sense of an iconic sign ( in semiotics this is a sign that represents by virtue of resemblance); but rather in the more colloquial sense used by curators, collectors, auction houses etc., meaning, roughly, an outstanding example of an artist's work or of a phase of an artist's work.

An iconic work provides a key that can unlock our understanding of an artist's style (where style is a series of implied choices the artist has made, including choices about content and materials). To call a work iconic is to make an evaluative judgment about its quality.

My hypothesis is that iconic works by contemporary artists may initially be difficult to recognise as such, but that this becomes easier when posthumously when the artist's repertoire is closed. In practice there is often a great deal of consensus amongst art historians, critics, curators and collectors about which are the iconic works of an artist, and which fall short of this. Iconic works emerge as having passed the test of time. (For the idea that there might be such a thing as an expert critic, see David Hume's classic essay 'Of The Standard of Taste')

In this sense the group of paintings in the so-called Rothko Room at Tate Modern are an unequivocal example of an iconic work.

In the gallery we looked at Roy Lichtenstein's 'Whaam!' as an example of an iconic work. One of the most famous of his pop works derived from comics, this was also one of his earliest works in this vein. The stylised version of the comic illustration of a fighter plane in action embodies most of the characteristic features of this phase of his work and has been recognised by critics and art historians as a key work.

Umberto Boccioni's cast sculpture 'Unique Forms of Continuity in Space' in the same room is more problematic. Although clearly iconic as a key work of futurism and of the artist's output, the cast in the gallery  is a posthumous one, made in 1972, so cannot have been authorised by the artist.

7 Ways of Thinking About Art - Notes on Art as Original

Notes from the 6th session of Seven Ways of Thinking About Art, Tate Modern

This week we focused on two related aspects of original works of art:

1) Originals: how does knowledge that a work of art before us is an original (rather than a forgery or a copy) affect our understanding and appreciation of it?

2) Originality: what is the relevance of an artist’s creative originality, in the sense of doing something distinctively new?

These questions link back to issues we’ve discussed in previous sessions about the relevance of factual knowledge to the appreciation of works or art, and the part played by context and an artwork’s presumed aetiology (the history of how it came to be as it is).

Forgeries
Han van Meegeren, the most famous forger, painted and artificially aged early ‘Vermeers’ with great success. In particular he convinced the eminent art historian Bredius that his ‘Supper at Emmaus’ (1937) was a masterpiece by Vermeer. Van Meegeren’s success was in part based on his painting images in the style of Vermeer rather than copying particular paintings (so there was no risk of a point by point comparison of two images), by his choice of a period of Vermeer’s career from which there were few extant examples (an exception being the painting in the National Gallery of Scotland by Vermeer, Christ at the House of Martha and Mary) - there is, however, a more characteristic Vermeer forgery in the RIjkmuseum here. Once van Meegeren had had one of his forgeries accepted as original, this helped set the ‘precedent class’ of early Vermeers and acted as a touchstone for future attributions. This in part explains the art historians’ gullibility. Also, much of the attribution was conducted in war conditions, so most of the paintings which were to act as comparisons were hidden away in vaults. Van Meegeren was exposed because he had been accused of selling off national treasures to the Nazis – his confession to the lesser crime of forgery wasn’t surprising.

A recent case of forgery in the case of CD recordings, that of the pianist Joyce Hatto and her posthumous increase in reputation,  raises interesting parallel questions to the question about originality in the visual arts. For more on this, read philosopher Denis Dutton on the Joyce Hatto case.

Another interesting recent case is that of a forgery of a Gauguin sculpture of a Faun...this was only detected by tracing provenances, not by any forensic evidence about materials or stylistic evidence of incongruity.

Some people have argued that if a work has appropriate aesthetic qualities, it doesn’t matter who painted or performed it. Its beauty and profundity are all that matter. Arthur Koestler, for instance suggested that much of our preference for original works is mere snobbery.

However, the important point in the cases of both van Meegeren and Joyce Hatto is that part of our appreciation of art is an appreciation of it in the context of its being an artistic creation by a particular person at a particular time: it is not just a question of appreciating beautiful patterns, or subtle interpretations of a score. (In our earlier session on Art as Conceptual we looked at Danto and Dickie's views on the non-identity of visually indiscernible objects: the idea that two apparently identical paintings can have completely different artistic qualities because of the history of how they came to be as they are).

One reason why origins might be important could be to do with the way in which artists typically create their own repertoire of expression through their oeuvres. If Mondrian’s ‘Broadway Boogie Woogie’ turns out to have been misattributed to Mondrian when it was actually painted by Jackson Pollock in his later years, then this would be transformed from a painting expressive of joy and exuberance, to one that seemed repressed and highly controlled. If a forger successfully inserts forgeries in the style of an artist into that artist’s known repertoire, then he or she prevents the artist from communicating by changing the expressive power not only of the image in question but also distorts the whole repertoire (imagine if van Meegeren had inserted thirty ‘early Vermeers’ into Vermeer’s quite small oeuvre of paintings – we would come to see him as an artist who had turned away from religious painting for some reason, and perhaps make very different interpretations of each of the later works in the light of the earlier).

So one answer to the question ‘What is wrong with a forgery in the style of a particular artist?’ is that it can prevent that artist communicating effectively with us.

We also discussed Nelson Goodman's idea that the knowledge that a painting is a forgery actually affects what we see, that seeing isn't simply a matter of what meets the back of the eyeball, but rather as Ernst Gombrich stressed, we need to take account of  'the beholder's share', how our knowledge and beliefs affect what we see...Goodman's views on this topic are summarised here.

Further Reading

Denis Dutton has an excellent short piece 'Forgery and Plagiarism' which I strongly recommend you read if you are interested in getting an overview of the main philosophical issues here. It also provides an account of the Van Meegeren forgeries and the career of the forger Eric Hebborn.

By far the best book in this area is edited by Denis Dutton: The Forger's Art. Sadly it is currently out of print, but you might find it in a library. It contains a very interesting essay about Van Meegeren followed by all the most important recent philosophical articles on the aesthetic status of forgeries.

Alfred Lessing 'What is Wrong With A Forgery?' is reprinted in Nigel Warburton (ed.) Philosophy: Basic Readings, 2nd ed., as is Jorge Luis Borges' story 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote' which explores ideas about the non-identity of indiscernible objects...

7 Ways of Thinking About Art - Notes on Art as Self-Expressive

For this week's session of 7 Ways of Thinking About Art we focussed on R.G.Collingwood's theory of art as set out in his book The Principles of Art (1938).

For Collingwood, the artist 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.

For Collingwood 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 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 a hopelessly outmoded and romantic approach to art; others acknowledged that this is close to how many gallery goers understand art.

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

In the galleries we looked at works by Giacometti and Rothko (in Material Gestures, level 3 of Tate Modern) from Collignwood's perspective. These works lend themselves to this sort of treatment. Other works, such as the conceptual art we looked at last week, certainly would not.

If you want to learn more about Rothko's Seagram Murals there is a fascinating article about the works in the Rothko Room by Jonathan Jones here and another by the novelist John Banville here Also an mp3 on Rothko's painting techniques.

Next week, art as original...Don't forget we are meeting in the East Room of Tate Modern...

You can read Miranda's blog post on the session on art as intentional here.