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.
The Art/Craft Distinction
Someone making a work of craft typically has a blueprint that they use to make the finished object. The blueprint is the design that determines the final form of the object. A carpenter making a table will have a plan, raw materials that will make the table and various tools. The carpenter knows when the table he or she is making is complete and knows to a high degree of accuracy what features the finished table will have before he or she picks up a saw or a chisel. Works of craft are, then, planned, and they fulfil certain criteria for success. They have a function too. They are designed for a purpose
Collingwood realised that art usually involves craft. It would be naïve to think, or example, that when Michaelangelo began to paint the Sistine Chapel ceilings that he had no plan. Collingwood’s point, however, is that planning is not a necessary feature of art, nor is it distinctive of it. In contrast it is a necessary part of craftwork. Collingwood gives the example of a sculptor playing with a piece of clay and finding his fingers turning it into a little dancing man. The fact that he didn’t plan to produce such a sculpture, nor knew how it was going to turn out until he had been making it for some time, does not prevent its being a work of art. Picasso’s working methods, didn’t involve the sorts of planning that the Technical Theory presupposes.
Collingwood distances himself from the idea that creating a work of art is essentially a matter of coming up with a blueprint and then making an object that will have a preconceived effect. He labels such an approach the ‘Technical Theory of Art’. According to the Technical Theory an artist will necessarily distinguish planning from execution; the artist will also have a pre-planned effect that he or she is aiming at.
In contrast, for Collingwood, a work of art does not typically involve an artist mapping out a highly detailed plan of what he or she is creating. Art often involves designing while making. A sculptor picks up a piece of clay and starts modelling it, and a small figure gradually emerges, with the artist, refining what he or she is making in the very process of making it. It is difficult, too, to declare that a work of art is finished: many artists feel that they have had to stop where they did, but that there was still more that might have been done to improve the work.
Collingwood explains this process of creating a work of art in terms of the expression of an emotion. The artist begins with what Collingwood calls an ‘inchoate’ emotion, one that is somewhat vague and imprecise. In the process of making a work of art, the artist creates a precise expression of that emotion. The making of the work of art is the way in which the artist makes this inchoate emotion clear to him or herself. It is the external expression and clarificiation of the emotion. When a viewer comes to experience the work, he or she through engaging and interpreting it, goes through a similar process of clarification of a precise emotion.
Criticisms of Collingwood
One major consequence of Collingwood’s theory is that it rules all works that are not expressions of an emotion in the sense outlined above as not art. So, to take a famous example from the early Twentieth Century, Marcel Duchamp’s 'Fountain' is a urinal produced in a factory, signed ‘R. Mutt’ by Duchamp and entered into an open exhibition, the ‘Society for Independent Artists’ show in New York in 1917. It is very hard to see this in terms of Duchamp having an inchoate emotion that he gradually clarified in the process of making the work of art. This is a largely conceptual work of art, one that ushered in a radically different approach to art from what had gone before. Duchamp deliberately avoided making the object himself – this was a Readymade (his term for works of this kind). It was a self-conscious challenge to accepted definitions of what art was and should be. Nevertheless it seems to have been accepted into the mainstream of art history as so many avant garde pieces eventually are. From Collingwood’s perspective, Fountain would presumably not be art proper. It is not by any stretch of the imagination an act of emotional expression. Some may see this as a sign that Collingwood’s theory was a good one, since it discriminates expressive art from what they might see as charlatanism. Other people will reject Collingwood’s theory because of its inability to deal with what they take to be a paradigm case of a work of art. On this latter view, Collingwood was wrong to generalise from a particular kind of emotionally expressive art to all art: it just isn’t true that all art expresses emotion. Some art is much more cerebral than that.
On the other hand, Collingwood’s theory appeals very much to some artists, those artists who do work in the way he describes. It is surely true, that, for example, many of the Abstract Expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko (we looked at examples of both in Tate Modern) would have understood what they were doing in terms very similar to Collingwood’s. Their concern was to express their emotions in paint, often using strong painting gestures that left marks that are obviously emotionally charged. But to assume that because the theory is enlightening about some particular cases it will fit all cases is clearly wrong.
Further Reading
Chapter Two of Nigel Warburton The Art Question
Aaron Ridley R.G. Collingwood
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