art and allusion

Aesthetics: Classic Theories - Notes from Session 5

Gotthold Lessing's ideas about the Laocoön were the main topic this week. This classical sculpture, now in the Vatican, depicts Laocoon and his two sons being attacked by serpents (a punishment meted out by the gods). Prior to Lesssing's book, Winckelmann, the art historian, had maintained that Laocoön's mouth was only half-open in a sigh rather than bellowing as he is described in the Aeneid by Vergil because this reflected the grandeur and perhaps the stoicism of the Ancient Greeks.

Lessing disagrees. For him, this is about the visual arts doing what they do best: had the sculptor shown the face in the full grimace of a bellow, then the imagination would have had no further place to go...as it is, the sculpture engages our creative intellect and invites us to imagine the next phase of the writhing in agony.

Lessing disputes the Latin poet Horace's aphorism that 'ut pictura poesis' (i.e. that pictures and poetry are similar). For Lessing each has its distinctive potentials.

In some ways Lessing's focus on the distinct properties of pictures and of words is a precursor of semiotics, and in particular C.S. Peirce's division of sign types into index, icon and symbol (there is a fuller explanation of this here). Roughly an index is a sign that represents by causal connection (smoke means fire); an icon by resemblance (a picture resembles what it is of); and a symbol represents by means of a convention ('cat' means that furry animal, but the word 'cat' is arbitrary - it could just as easily have been 'mountain').

With iconic signs, as Nelson Goodman pointed out, every change in the sign potentially represents something different (a smug retouching of the Mona Lisa's smile could, with a line as fine as a hair, radically change what was represented); whereas the colour or font in which a poem is printed don't (typically) affect the poem's meaning.

In the gallery we looked at the two works in Room 1 of 'States of Flux', Tate Modern: concentrating on the ways in which the still arts of painting and sculpture dealt with events unfolding over time, a theme in Lessing's writing.

Aesthetics: Classic Theories, Notes from Session 4

The focus of this week's work was Edmund Burke's  ideas about the Sublime (see his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime of 1757 - see reading 12 in set book for the course Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology ed. Cahn and Meskin). A complete online searchable text of Burke's Enquiry is available here.

Burke's account of our responses to beauty and the sublime focuses on the bodily and emotional responses to physical objects: in many ways a stark contrast with Plato's more cerebral approach that ultimately sees beauty as something lying beyond sensory perception and best appreciated by the intellect. Burke also gave aesthetics an interesting direction by giving clear expression to idea that beauty may not be the only quality in nature and art that moves us profoundly...

Burke maintained, quite plausibly that pain and pleasure aren't on the same spectrum. A reduction of pain does not automatically lead to an increase in pleasure (though, in his terminology, reduction of pain results in delight).

Pain is effective in our self-preservation; pleasure makes social interaction possible.

Pain has the power to move us more profoundly than pleasure. To back up this claim he points out that few would agree to a life of exquisite pleasures if they knew that this would end with brutal torture.

Burke described beauty as 'for the greater part, some quality in bodies, acting mechanically upon the human mind by the intervention of the senses' (p.119 of Cahn and Meskin eds). Beauty is a quality that tends to produce pleasure.

The sublime in contrast is always in some way linked with terror. Not complete terror, but rather with the potential for danger. Causes which under different circumstances might endanger us evoke the emotions of the sublime.

The key passage in which Burke contrasts the beautiful and the sublime is this (see p.120 of Cahn and Meskin eds.), from Section XXVll of the Enquiry [NB he uses 'the great' as a synonym for 'sublime' here at several points]:

 "For sublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones comparatively small;beauty should be smooth, and polished; the great rugged and negligent; beauty should shun the right line, yet deviate from it insensibly; the great in many cases loves the right line, and when it deviates, it often makes a strong deviation; beauty should not be obscure; the great out to be dark and gloomy; beauty should be light and delicate; the great ought to be solid, and even massive. They are indeed ideas of a very different nature, one being founded on pain, the other on pleasure..."

Burke believed that the reason we frequently take delight in intrinsically painful situations - an apparent paradox [related to the Paradox of Tragedy - listen to a podcast on Paradox of Tragedy] is that this is nature's way of toning up our nervous systems. While this last point isn't particularly persuasive, his general account of the contrast between beauty and the sublime has been extremely influential.

In the Tate Modern gallery we looked at all the works in Room 6 Poetry and Dream: Joseph Beuys' huge work 'Lightning With Stag in Its Glare' and two paintings by Anselm Kiefer: 'Lilith' and 'Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom'. All had qualities of scale, roughness, terror, gloomy colouring and so on that make the notion of the sublime relevant to their appreciation. Mark Rothko's 'Seagram Murals', the focus of a previous week's class also displayed some of these qualities, and there may have been a direct connection here since Rothko had certainly read and admired Burke's book.

Garry Fabian Miller - exhibition at James Hyman Gallery, 5 Savile Row, London

Garry Fabian Miller has a remarkable sincerity and purity in his approach to photography. This show, Time Passage, traces his development from early sea horizon photographs, reminiscent of Sugimoto at his best, beautifully printed vintage prints made when Miller was only 18, through pictures created by shining light through translucent leaves, to the camera-less imagery for which he is best known. The 'Becoming Magma' series, inspired by his reading of James Lovelock's work, provides an emotionally intense engagement, and the lastest works have a density of colour that even the best reproduction can only hint at. This exhibition provides an excellent opportunity to trace the development of Miller's art.

View Images in the Exhibition

Download the press release for Garry Fabian Miller's Time Passage

Oral History of Photography interview with Garry Fabian Miller

Bill Brandt resources (for Sotheby's Institute MA Photography)

Bill Brandt resources online

Below are some links to online resources relating to the photographer Bill Brandt. Please let me know of any additional resources you discover.

Bill Brandt Archive. Many useful resources here (click on 'News' and then 'Research' for the most useful)

Wikipedia entry on Brandt (with links)

Articles, Review and Bibliographies by Nigel Warburton

'Brandt's Pictorialism' (article)

Brandt's wartime commission to photograph Rochester and Canterbury catherdrals (article)

Review of Paul Delany's biography of Brandt

Bibliography of books by and about Brandt

Bibliography of writing by Brandt

Recent photographs of the Snicket Brandt photographed in Halifax

Books on Brandt I have contributed to

Below are some links to online resources relating to the photographer Bill Brandt. Please let me know of any additional resources you discover.

Bill Brandt Archive. Many useful resources here (click on 'News' and then 'Research' for the most useful)

Wikipedia entry on Brandt (with links)

Articles, Review and Bibliographies by Nigel Warburton

'Brandt's Pictorialism' (article)

Brandt's wartime commission to photograph Rochester and Canterbury catherdrals (article)

Review of Paul Delany's biography of Brandt

Bibliography of books by and about Brandt

Bibliography of writing by Brandt

Recent photographs of the Snicket Brandt photographed in Halifax

Books on Brandt I have contributed to

Session 3 of Aesthetics Classic Theories

I have made a twenty-minute audio file of the key parts of my presentation from the third session of this course. It is available to students on the course here (email me to get your username and password...or wait till next week when I will gives these out in class).

Further Notes from Session 3
For the first part of this session we focused on Plato's idea that the artists should be banished from his ideal republic and his views about beauty in the Symposium, particularly the thought, expressed through Socrates' account of what Diotima allegedly told him about how erotic love of a beautiful boy could be the first rung on an ascent up a ladder that lead to contemplation of the Form of Beauty (which for Plato was intimately tied to the Good in the sense of moral good). Iris Murdoch in The Fire and the Sun (published in  1977, but given as a series of lectures in 1976) gives a succinct summary of Plato's ideas about art, but she also spends the last quarter of the book opposing them (read a review of The Fire and the Sun). Put simply, she believes that great art can reveal truth in various ways, and even that the pilgrimage from appearance to reality is the major theme of great art; furthermore, lesser art, she thinks, is relatively harmless (I discuss this on the  20-minute audio clip that students on the course have access to, see above).

In the second half of the session we explored some of David Hume's thoughts about aesthetic judgment as discussed in his essay 'Of the Standard of Taste' [download a sensitively-paraphrased version] thoughts which he had presumably already worked out as a young man when he planned the never-published fifth book of his Treatise 'Of Criticism'. This essay is quite difficult to read. At its heart is the  paradox that we both want to say that beauty and other aesthetic merit is in the eye of the beholder, and so a matter for subjective judgement, but at the same time think that people who hold views such as 'Tracey Emin is a greater artist than Leonardo da Vinci' (not Hume's example!) are just wrong.

Hume maintains that most of us are not in a great position to make reliable aesthetic judgements because we do not necessarily have accurate perception and understanding of the work under consideration. There must be general principles underlying critical judgments whether or not we know what they are. But above all we need a critic who can perceive what is there. The ideal critic, amongst other things, has

Delicacy of Taste (remember the story of the key with the leather thong at the bottom of the hogshead of wine. You might also want to read the further essay Hume wrote called 'Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion')
Practice (Hume also includes the requirement that the critic view the work more than once)
The Ability to Make Comparisons (historical as well as contemporary)
Is not Prejudiced and has
Good Sense (i.e. reason that allows him or her to weight the different factors)
(I discuss all of these on the audio clip).

Someone who exercises these qualities can stand as a touchstone against which to measure taste. Others can learn from such a person and recognize the distinctions that he or she draws. Where, over time, there is a consensus amongst such critics this is the strongest evidence we have of a work's worth (people now speak of a work's 'passing the Test of Time'). It may be a matter of subjectivity how we feel about a work of art, but that doesn't mean that any judgement we make, which may well be based on a poor assessment of what it is that we are looking at, is respectable...not unless we possess the attributes of an ideal critic. And if we do, we can set the standard of taste. [For a related discussion about judgements of taste in relation to wine, informed by a reading of Hume,  listen to Barry C. Smith, editor of a recent book Questions of Taste on Philosophy Bites. Read my review of this book here and a longer one by Christopher Shields here]

In the gallery we looked at works in the Level 5 'Idea and Object' section in groups, reflecting on the categories of the ideal critic, the degree to which perceptive or knowledgeable individuals could help others to see or understand something about a work they hadn't previously realized was there...