art and allusion

Contemporary Aesthetics - Tate Modern - Notes from Session One

Tate Modern course: notes from Session One of Contemporary Aesthetics

Reading 35 from set book: Morris Weitz 'The Role of Theory in Aesthetics'

We considered Weitz's anti-theoretical position - he declares 'Art' and its sub-concepts (e.g. collage) to be Open Concepts and explains traditional aesthetic theorizing as resting on the mistake of misidentifying Art as the sort of concept that can be defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions (remember necessary = pre-requisite; sufficient = guarantee). Because of the influence of Wittgenstein's notion of a family resemblance term, Weitz's approach is sometimes described as neo-Wittgensteinian. Basically he opposes the idea that Art and its sub-concepts are the sorts of concepts that lend themselves to definition - instead we rely on a pattern of criss-crossing and overlapping resemblances with paradigm cases of art or of the subconcept and as a community of language users make a judgement (presumably usually a tacit one) about whether or not to extend the concept to cover the new or controversial case.

Art theory of the past isn't useless though - Weitz suggests we read it as recommending paying greater attention to particular features of art (representation, expression, form or whatever) that may have been neglected in the past rather than what it purports to be, namely an attempt at definition.

For Weitz, any attempt to close the concept Art (or its sub-concepts) risks foreclosing on creativity...

His conclusion about the logical impossibility of defining Art is too strong - his supporting evidence is:  art theory or the past has failed; the open concept idea has some plausibility as an explanation; and art is adventurous and thrives on not being constrained. None of these, even jointly, leads to the conclusion that art, logically, cannot be defined, only that it may be difficult to define and possibly to the conclusion that the open concept approach is the best available explanation of what is going on.

Listen to a podcast interview on the definition of art

For further discussion of this topic, see my book The Art Question (Routledge), especially Chapter 3 'Family Resemblances'.

Download Powerpoint Presentation from Session One (for personal use only)

Next week: Readings 36 and 37. The Artworld and the Institutional Theory of Art.

Readings Week by Week (numbers are references to readings in ed. Cahn and Meskin Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology ).

Week One: 35 (Neo-Wittgensteinian approaches to Art)
Week Two, 36, 37 (The Institutional Theory of Art)
Week Three: 39 (Identifying Art ) NB note change to previous reading!
Week Four: 43 (Aesthetic Concepts)
Week Five: 47, 48 (Intentions and Interpretation)
Week Six 52 (Individual Style)

Contemporary Aesthetics - Tate Modern - Reading For the Course

Contemporary Aesthetics, Tate Modern.

Several students asked me to provide advance notice of reading and topics for this course which begins on Monday 1st June at 6.45 p.m in Tate Modern. So here it is. I may need to change the order and content, depending on which bits of the gallery we can use. All numbers refer to the set book ed. Cahn and Meskin.

Week One: 35 (Neo-Wittgensteinian approaches to Art)
Week Two, 36, 37 (The Institutional Theory of Art)
Week Three: 39 (Identifying Art ) NB note change to previous reading!
Week Four: 43 (Aesthetic Concepts)
Week Five: 47, 48 (Intentions and Interpretation)
Week Six 52 (Individual Style)

My book, The Art Question (Routledge) is also relevant background reading for weeks one and two.

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 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.

Modern Aesthetics, Tate Modern - Notes from Session One

Modern Aesthetics, Tate Modern, session one. We focused on Arthur Schopenhauer (reading 19 from the set book Cahn and Meskin eds Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology - this reading gets much easier to understand from section 34 - don't be put off by the daunting opening).

Schopenhauer is much-loved by artists, writers and lovers of art because, unlike most thinkers, he put art and our experience of it at the heart of his philosophy. His main work, The World as Will and Representation (first published 1819, sometimes translated as The World as Will and Idea) is, like most philosophy about appearance and reality. You can listen to a podcast I made about Schopenhauer here. This is based on a chapter from my book Philosophy: The Classics.

Key Terms

The Will (with a capital 'W') is the ultimate source of everything, the undifferentiated life energy that is behind every appearance. This is the true nature of the world - it is all Will.

The world we experience most of the time is the world as Representation. This is our experience of individual things, of what he calls objectification of the Will. This representation comes in different grades, different levels of removal from the Will.

Platonic Ideas are outside of space and time and are what Schopenhauer calls direct objectifications of the Will. [Those of you who didn't take Classic Aesthetics might want to look at notes on Plato on the Forms or Ideas here and follow some of the links. Basically Plato believed that reality consists of these abstract entities - the chair you see is an imperfect copy of the abstract idea of a chair. If you find that hard to believe, think of how any real circle is always an imperfect representation of the Idea of a circle which has no imperfections. Plato famously denigrated mimetic or representational art because it was at several removes from reality - a picture of a chair is a representation of a representation, and not reliable about the Idea.]

will with a lower case 'w' is desire. Part of Schopenhauer's pessimistic outlook is that he believes that our desires, even when fulfilled, lead to further desires and that we are for the most part in torment constantly striving for things. The experience of art can give us temporary relief from this suffering, but is more important than this because it becomes a kind of metaphysics, particularly when the art in question is music.

[Click on the red text below to read the rest of these notes on Session One]

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.

Notes from Aesthetics - Classic Theories, Week Two

In the second session of the course Aesthetics: Classic Theories, we continued looking at Plato's approach, concentrating on his ideas about beauty, as expressed in his great dialogue The Symposium. There, through the nested characters of Socrates and Diotima, Plato  stresses the limitations of the phenomenal world. He does, though, allow that physical beauty can play a part in the ascent towards appreciation of the Form of beauty.

This is all part of a conversation about the nature of erotic love that takes place at a drinking party. [Listen to a podcast interview about Plato on Erotic Love]. Socrates recalls Diotima's teaching that the desire for one beautiful man's body is merely the first rung on the ladder that leads up to the appreciation of the Form of beauty, and so is merely a means to the higher end of appreciating the abstract idea. To learn about beauty, first of all recognize the physical beauty of the desired lover. But then the rational individual will appreciate not just the individual loved one's beauty, but also the physical beauty of others too. From this the next step up the ladder is to see the beauty that lies beyond appearances in wisdom and knowledge. The last step is to come to recognize the Form of beauty itself - with the implication that this Form itself possesses beauty. The Form of beauty also carries with it moral qualities of goodness. Plato does not mention beauty in art as having a potential role in this ascent - given the views he expressed in The Republic, it is unlikely that he thought it could play a role. (For a nice summary of Plato on Art, see Christopher Janaway's essay in the Routledge Companion to Aesthetics).

[To read the rest of this summary click on the red writing below]

Forthcoming courses on Philosophy of Art at Tate Modern

Tate Modern courses on Aesthetics

I will be teaching three 6-session courses on Aesthetics next academic year. These will all be at Tate Modern. Read more about these courses here.