art and allusion

Evolutionary Aesthetics - A review of Denis Dutton's new book

In The Art Instinct Denis Dutton argues that our instinct for art was formed during the Pleistocene period.  I have reviewed Dutton's book for April's Prospect Magazine (read my review here.) As well as writing on aesthetics Dutton runs the marvellous Arts and Letters Daily site. Numerous other reviews of The Art Instinct are available here.

Modern Aesthetics, Tate Modern - Notes from Session Six

 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 of the readings we have looked at in this course. If you are going to re-read the Heidegger essay, I recommend downloading Timothy Quigley's very clear notes on his New School, New York website here. Click on the > next to 'schedule' in the lefthand column. Scroll down to weeks 9 and 10 and click on the little > signs next to the files you want. The pdfs should download straight away (he has given permission to link to this page).

Heidegger's essay is about 'the thinglyness of things'- but what can that possibly mean?

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), 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).The painting 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) probably 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.' (It is ironic then if these were in truth a painting of the artist's own shoes, and perhaps metaphorically about mortality rather than about peasant toil).

The material that is used up in making a piece of equipment, is itself foregrounded in a work of art in a way that is not either for a brute stone nor for any piece of equipment.

In the gallery we concentrated on several pieces by Roni Horn in the Roni Horn aka Roni Horn exhibition, contrasting them with the notion of a worldless stone, and exploring the question of whether they set forward their own material existence (unlike a piece of equipment that uses up its raw materials). For these works at least, what we extracted from the thicket of Heidegger's prose gave some insights into the particular pieces.

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, but Dreyfus is renowned as one of the clearer expositors of a notoriously difficult thinker.

Modern Aesthetics - Tate Modern - Notes from Fifth Session

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, see Nigel Warburton 'Authentic Photographs', British Journal of Aesthetics, 1997]

In the Tate Modern gallery we looked at a range of still photographs and prints. Cy Twombly's series of prints 'Natural History' seemed to be playing with ideas about authenticity and reproducibility, mixing lithographic reproductions of collage with real collage and scrawled additions, teasing the viewer about which was which. In contrast, posthumously made prints from Eileen Agar negatives did not have any aura of authenticity. But the same is not necessarily true of all photographic prints - the case of John Deakin's famous photographic portrait of Francis Bacon which, as far as I know, exists only as a torn and battered unique print, might be thought an example of a photograph which despite Benjamin's claims possesses an aura in part because of the history of it as object (and even if it is not unique, this print has an aura due to its particular history of neglect).

Modern Aesthetics, Tate Modern - notes from session 4

For the fourth session of Modern Aesthetics at Tate Modern we discussed R.G. Collingwood's account of art as expression of emotion. (Reading 26 in the set book).

Clive Bell’s formalism emphasised the nature of the work of art from the perspective of a viewer rather than a creator. Colingwood’s expression theory of art, in contrast, emphasises the role of the creator. Collingwood came from a family of visual artists and was himself a skilled painter as well as a philosopher (and, unusually for a philosopher, an archaeologist specialising in Roman remains).  Unlike Bell, he did not believe that philosophers of art should be looking to explain ‘art’ as a timeless category; on the contrary, he believed that their task should be to explain the art of their time. He was writing in the 1930s and the artists whose work most impressed him were the poet T.S. Eliot and, once again, the painter Paul Cézanne.

Collingwood’s theory is unashamedly evaluative in that it separates out those works which have been called ‘art’ but don’t deserve the term, from those which genuinely merit being called art. True art, or ‘art proper’ as he calls it, is a particular kind of expressed emotion:

The artist proper is a person who, grappling with the problem of expressing a certain emotion, says, ‘I want to get this clear.’

 Art proper may superficially resemble some craft in appearance, but art is very different from craft. Indeed much of his theory depends on a clear-cut art/craft distinction. In this his theory is very different from Bell’s.

Modern Aesthetics, Tate Modern - Notes from Session 3

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 Revisited disagreed 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) - a stark contrast with Tolstoy's claim that art is a special kind of human communication.

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 by Rodchenko and Popova in the current Tate Modern exhibition. Whilst approaching these paintings and sculptures as potentially Significant Form was easy, because they are mostly non-representational, ignoring the circumstances of their production seemed a little perverse, particularly when, as the captions in the exhibition indicate, these artists working in the period immediately after the Bolshevik revolution, felt liberated to create new forms of art, and at the same time were no doubt limited in materials and scale by their straightened circumstances.