art and allusion

Existential Themes in Modern & Contemporary Art: forthcoming Tate Modern Course

Monday evenings Tate Modern 11th June - 9th July. A 5-session course exploring existential themes in modern and contemporary art, led by Nigel Warburton (booking essential):

Anguish, Absurdity, Death

7 Ways of Thinking About Art: Notes from Session 2

Art as Intentional

Read notes from session 1 of the course

For session 2 of the Tate Modern course 7 Ways of Thinking About Art (tickets only, sold out), we concentrated on the contrast between those, such as Clive Bell, who advocate scrutiny of form and those such as Richard Wollheim who argue that criticism and interpretation require retrieval, a kind of archaeology of the artist's intentions against a historical background.

Bell believed that what all art has in common is that it possesses Significant Form. Not all form is significant, but when patterns of lines, shapes and colours (and some depth) combine they can produce an aesthetic emotion in a sensitive viewer. All around us are objects charged with the capacity to move us aesthetically, but only the sensitive perceive and feel this. The beauty of a butterfly's wing, though, is not Significant Form for Bell - it is found in human creations, which may be as diverse as a Chinese carpet, the Cathedral at Chartres, or a painting by Duccio or Picasso. For Bell, we should bring nothing of life to art. All art through ages has achieved its status as art from these formal properties. The emotion they produce, aesthetic emotion, is not characteristic of everyday life. For Bell its power almost certainly came from its potential to put us in touch with the noumenal world (a Kantian term), that is the world of deeper reality that lies behind the veil of everyday appearances and is not usually available to us.

Another famous defence of anti-intentionalism was Wimsatt and Beardsley's famous paper 'The Intentional Fallacy'. ('Fallacy'  in this context is simply an unreliable way of arguing) There they argued that we shouldn't treat the author of a poem as an oracle about its meaning. Rather, readers should focus on the words on the page, and not get embroiled in author psychology. Their main argument was that appeals to authors' intentions were either misleading or unnecessary. If the poem failed to achieve the poet's intentions, then it was misleading to refer to the intentions as the source of its meaning; if the poem did achieve the aims, then appeals to intention were redundant since the meaning was there to be discerned in the poem.

The philosopher Stanley Cavell used a knock-down argument to make the first of these two points:

'...it no more counts towards the success or failure of a work of art that the artist intended something other than is there, than it counts when the referee is counting over a boxer that the boxer had intended to duck' (in 'Music Discomposed').

Difficulties with the anti-intentionalist position include the fact that as Ernst Gombrich often pointed out, there is no innocent eye. Also it is hard to appreciate irony if you don't have some access to the artist's or writer's intentions. Extreme anti-intentionalists would say that to appreciate a Rembrandt self-portrait the fact that the artist intended (if he did) to potray himself ageing, is irrelevant to our appreciaton of it as art - this seems wrong. Subject matter has to be part of some art. It also seems a bit perverse not to find out as much as you possibly can about the circumstances in which a work of art was produced.

For more about Clive Bell and why is theory of art fails, see Chapter One of my book The Art Question. The late Denis Dutton put an extract of the most pertinent passages from Bell's Art with very useful illustrations on his website. Wimsatt and Beardsley's paper 'The Intentional Fallacy' is reprinted in my book (ed.) Philosophy: Basic Readings, 2nd ed.

In contrast, intentionalists, such as Richard Wollheim, argue that the job of the critic or viewer involves retrieval, retrieval of an artist's intentions, motivations, historical milieu, and so on. Understanding a work of art involves understanding how it came to be as it is. Obviously information is incomplete in many cases, but this does not prevent it from being a worthwhile goal where we do have access to background information. Nor would Wollheim want us to forego spending time looking very closely at the work itself; it is just that the history of how it came to be as it is, its aetiology is important for understanding it.

For more on Intentionalism see Richard Wollheim 'Criticism as Retrieval' supplementary essay in the second ed. of his book Art and Its Objects. (For a fascinating discussion of a related question about why we value objects with particular histories rather than their indistinguishable copies, see Paul Bloom's interview 'Why do we like what we like?')

The philosopher Stephen Neale discusses the wider question of the importance of intentions to meaning and interpretation in this podcast interview from the Philosophy Bites series (highly recommended for his  discussion of  his involvement in the interpretation of US drugs law in relation to the use of firearms!). For a general discussion of the question 'What is Art?' listen to this Philosophy Bites audio interview with Derek Matravers.

A third position, taken by Jerry Fodor in his article 'It's Deja Vu All Over Again' (a quotation from the accidentally  brilliant Yogi Berra - my favourite quotation of his is 'When you come to a fork in the road, take it') is what might be called Virtual Intentionalism. Here the facts don't matter so much about what the artist's actual intentions were. The point is to try to reconstruct what they might reasonably have been. The artist can't overrule your interpretation here.
Fodor's article is in Danto and His Critics.

Something we didn’t get on to: the question of whether discussion of artist’s intentions implies a misleading picture of what it is to do something intentionally. Many writers in this area describe intentions as if artists had introspectible mental events that are the precursors of and causes of their works. But is this so? What of R.G. Collingwood’s account of art (in his The Principles of Art) where he described the artist as beginning with an inchoate emotion that he or she makes clear to him or herself in the process of producing a work of art. On that picture (which rings true with many artists), the idea that an artist has a clear intention that precedes the creation of the artwork is implausible in most cases.

In the galleries we visited 'Elements of Chance', 'The Reclining Nude', and Joseph Beuys, testing the stance of a formalist against that of an intentionalist in relation to particular works.

Next week: ticketholders meet in Tate Britain via Clore wing (NOT Tate Modern!) at usual time. We'll be in the Duffield Room, and then in the galleries. No drinks afterwards just for this week. Finishing time 8.30pm. More information about topics and dates of sessions.

 

7 Ways of Thinking About Art: Notes from Session 1

Art as Thought-Provoking

The main focus of this week’s session of 7 Ways of Thinking About Art (Tate Modern) was the tension between treating works of art as catalysts for subjective musing and the idea that they might (or should, to be any good) have definite objective meanings. I presented these two approaches as at opposite ends of a scale, though these may not be mutually exclusive. 

A key question is the degree to which works of art are like Rorschach inkblots: stimuli for projective interpretation, where autobiography, mood, and mental set of the viewer play a substantial role. Whilst it is naive to believe it possible to enter a gallery with an innocent eye, the mind cleansed of all associations and expectations, and plausible to think that seeing is, as the philosopher of science N.R. Hanson put it, 'a theory-laden activity' ('There is more to seeing than meets the eyeball'), there are still limits to interpretation.  We can't see whatever we want to see - our interpretations are based on something out there even if they are idiosyncratic or whimsical. Nevertheless, context and expectation have a significant role to play, as they do in most aspects of our life (read this interesting discussion of the psychology of why we like what we like)

Many appreciators of the visual arts are content that particular works of art should simply stimulate a range of interesting responses, and believe that art should be open-ended. It is an orthodoxy amongst views of contemporary art that didactic art tends to be bad art - it is in ambiguity and the possibility of generating new interpretations that art's value lies. In contrast to this view, Alain de Botton has recently asserted in his book Religion for Atheists, that good art can and should be didactic, that it should teach us through sensuous beautiful creations, to be good and wise.

You can listen to a short audio interview I made with Alain de Botton which includes a discussion of his view of art here. 

In the gallery we visited the Yayoi Kusama exhibition. 

 

Kusama's art can be enjoyed as visual experience and catalyst for reverie, but some of it has clear intended content - it is deliberately about something, and it is possible to misinterpret what it is about.  Some of the phallic imagery relates directly to her own fear of sex, as she has made clear in interviews. Although it is open to a range of interpretations, there are limits to what can be plausibly said about it. To interpret it, for example, as more aggressive and frightening than Louise Bourgeois's 'Filette' for example, would be odd.

In other pieces Kusama explores the concept of infinity (for a philosophical discussion of infinity and its significance, listen to this interview with Adrian Moore in the Philosophy Bites series).  The remarkable 'Infinity Mirrored Room' invites the viewer to immerse him or herself in an experience of infinite regress which is also quite beautiful.  This display of coloured lights suspended above water and surrounded by mirrors is suggestive of stars, of paper Japanese lanterns, and more. It invites a loss of self, much as Rothko's Seagram paintings do. Unlike artists who deliberately make the viewer feel tiny and overwhelmed in relation to the infite (see notes on Edmund Burke on the sublime for a philosophical connection with that tendency), Kusama in this piece has created an installation that is almost womb-like and comforting, while at the same time stretches to infinity, a Tardis-like play with space that expresses a fundamental warmth for humanity that runs throughout her work. 

There is also a short light-hearted interview with Kusama here.

Next week we'll be considering the degree to which an artist's intentions should shape our understanding of the work. If you want to start thinking about this topic in advance of next week's session (in Tate Modern) look at some notes from a previous version of this course.

7 Ways of Thinking About Art: handout

The handout for the 7 Ways of Thinking About Art course (Tate Modern) which starts this evening , can be downloaded here:   Download Seven Ways of Thinking about Art course handout. The course is ticket only (sold out), but I'll be putting notes with links on this weblog a day or so after each session.

Seven Ways of Thinking About Art (Tate Modern course)

Seven Ways of Thinking About Art - a course at Tate Modern Feb-March 2012 led by Nigel Warburton. Booking details for the course.

Art, Politics, War: Tate Modern Course - Notes from Session 1

Notes from Tate Modern course Art, Politics, War (Monday evenings, Tate Modern 6th June - 11th June 2011, ticket holders only). 

Download handout

For the first session we explored some of the ways in which photographers communicate a moral or political stance, starting from Susan Sontag's famous claim in On Photography that 'strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph' - her claim that understanding involves appreciation of events unfolding over time, a sense of a narrative, and that individual still photographs characteristically reveal or portray moments and so cannot in themselves communicate or express a moral position [if you have access to an institutional online library you should be able to download my article 'Photographic Communication' that responds to Sontag].

[The 18th Century thinker Gotthold Lessing's discussion of the classical sculpture Laocoön could provide a way of answering Sontag to some degree on this point: Lessing argued that the visual arts are particularly good at implying narrative through the careful selection of the moment depicted - in his example, the expression on the dying man's face suggests the howl of anguish that is to follow. For more on this, see my (illustrated) brief note on Lessing from a previous Tate Modern course.]

Stuart Franklin's iconic image of the man standing in front of a row of tanks on the edge of Tiananmen Square in 1989 [illustrated and discussed here] served as an example of how much we owe to contextualisation. Much of the symbolic value of an individual standing up against a powerful force is, nevertheless, almost immediately legible.

If you want to understand more about the context of this iconic image, Franklin talks about his experience of Tiananmen Square and shows more images here, and a further video interview providing more context here. Seeing the iconic image in the context of a range of images of the surrounding events significantly affects our interpretation of the famous image. (I also  interviewed Franklin for my weblog Virtual Philosopher here.) Charlie Cole, another of the photographers who took a similar image of the tank man describes his experiences of the events here. It is interesting that Cole's image excluded the large visual context of a burnt out bus and the full line of tanks.

The kind of contextualization provided by the links above explains far more about the photograph than is legible from the image alone. Without this background information the moral significance of the events that this image crystallizes is far harder to read. The scope and brutality of the suppression is easy to forget. Knowledge of the readiness of tank drivers to crush protestors makes the tank man's actions even braver than it first appears. Most viewers of the still image will have seen the BBC footage of the young man's actions too. 

Documentary photographs correspond to some degree to the scene that was before the lens when the shutter fell (even if they interpret, distort, enhance or obscure). Paintings are more obviously interpretations, often incorporate symbolic elements, and, frequently are deliberately open to multiple, possibly conflicting interpretations (indeed, some would argue that a work of art that doesn't invite different readings would be a failure as art).

Picasso's Guernica (1937) probably the most famous and successful overtly political artwork ever. Emotionally there is no doubt that anguish, anger and outrage combine in Picasso's reaction to the brutal bombing and strafing of the inhabitants of Guernica by Italian and German planes. As a fund-raiser for the Spanish republican cause the image achieved a political aim through lack of ambiguity of stance. Yet at the same time, the complex image replete with symbols retains the kind of ambiguity that is characteristic of most art. There are some speculative thoughts about the meaning of various elements of the image - the bull, the horse, the woman with a child, etc., and the art historical allusions  -  ( in a tapestry version that hangs in the UN building) here - yet there is no simple key to its meaning that allows viewers to read off the 'true' interpretation of the narrative.

In the gallery we visited the exhibition of Simon Norfolk's 2010 photographs of Afghanistan shown alongside those of the 19th Century photographer John Burke. There is a review of this exhibition here and more about this 'collaboration' with a long-dead photographer here. The juxtaposition of an Irish photographer's take on the imperialist forces in Afghanistan 130 years ago with images of present day U.S. forces there carries a clear message of repetition of attitude and even means (many of the encampments visually echo their 19th century pre-cursors).

The video contextualizing the exhibition and revealing how some of the photographs were taken and providing a clear narrative structure within which to understand the images proved critical to most people's interpretation - view it here:

The key part of the audio of this video is from 14'10" where the photographer describes his attitude to the beauty of some of his photographs as just 'tactical' to seduce the viewer into considering his argument. He expresses his  real anger and disappointment at the war in Afghanistan, the desstruction of the country, the loss of life, and 'Billions wasted, and nothing achieved. Nothing, nothing achieved.' Once you have heard the photographer's passionate statement of his position it is difficult if not impossible to read any ambiguity of moral stance in the images. It also creates an uneasiness in viewers who focus on the aesthetic aspects of some of the photographs, the beauty of the dusk light, the low horizon with two thirds sky with the recruits marching through sand towards a truck in the distance - these elements once revealed as merely 'tactical' aren't the point of the images at all, just a way of making us stop and think. Some in the group felt that there was a risk of caricaturing the events that led to American presence in Afghanistan - that visual similarity doesn't indicate similarity of cause and effect - the similarities in some visual respects between what Burke documented and Norfolk may mask important differences that may be worth exploring too (which reminds me of David Hume's point in his Enquiries: 'Nothing so like as eggs; yet no one on account of this appearing similarity, expects the same taste and relish in all of them.)

Next week. Taryn Simon's exhibition...Read a review of this here. Watch a short interview with her discussing this show:

 

Tate Modern Aesthetics courses 2010 - booking now open

You can book for the Aesthetics courses I'm teaching at Tate Modern in 2010 here. Places usually go very quickly.

Tate Modern Course - 7 Ways of Thinking About Art - booking now open

You can now book by telephone on 0207 887 8888 for my 7 Ways of Thinking About Art course on Monday evenings at Tate Modern 19th October to 30th November 2009 (7 sessions). If you need information about the sorts of topics covered and the approach, you can check out notes from a previous version of this course.

Contemporary Aesthetics - Tate Modern - Session Two

Sorry for the delay in getting these notes to you.

Download Powerpoint of Contemporary Aesthetics Week 2

Read an Interview with Jeff Koons

Here's something I wrote for a previous course which connects with the topic, this was specifically about conceptual art...I hope it's useful.

What is conceptual art?

There are at least two answers:

What is conceptual art? There are at least two answers:

1) A post-Duchamp art movement that reached its zenith in the 1960s and 70s. (see Paul Wood Conceptual Art, Tate Publications or Wikipedia article on Conceptual Art with numerous links to conceptual artists' work)

2) Any art that is predominantly idea-based rather than created mainly for aesthetic appreciation. This is the more colloquial sense of the term ‘conceptual art’.
The main focus of this week’s session was on the second of these senses of ‘conceptual art’. In a broader sense, perhaps almost all art has some conceptual element (think of religious art, impressionism, cubism); but only where this dominates do we usually speak of a work as conceptual.

Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades are usually taken to be paradigms of conceptual art (in both senses above). With works such as Mark Wallinger’s A Real Work of Art (a real racehorse that he bought and put into races, but which he declared a work of art by choice of its name which was not meant to be metaphorical), there may be an aesthetic element: but what you see isn’t what you get.

The best explanation of what is going on with conceptual art is given by Arthur Danto (e.g. in his book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace) who wrote about the non-identity of indiscernibles. Just because you can’t tell two objects apart simply by looking at them it doesn’t follow that they express the same emotions, have the same content or meaning. The context and etiology of an object influence its meaing. A urinal on a production line has different proerperties from the urinal that Duchamp dubbed ‘Fountain’, signed R. Mutt and entered for exhibition in 1917.

But how can conceptual art be art? George Dickie’s first version of his Institutional Theory of Art gives one explanation. For him a work of art is an artifact some aspect of which has had the status of ‘candidate for appreciation’ conferred upon it by a member or members of the artworld (by artworld he meant anyone who believed themselves to be part of the artworld, not the social elite of curators, critics, gallery owners, collectorsand well-known artists). These provide necessary and sufficient conditions (pre-requisites and guarantees) that anything is a work of art. But this is a neutral sense of ‘art’: to say that something is a work of art implies nothing about its value. On this theory (which has been much criticized for being over-inclusive) it is very easy to see that, for example the minimal intervention of selecting and signing a urinal transforms it into an artifact, and entering it for an exhibition is an act of conferral of status of ‘candidate for appreciation’ (further reading, including criticism of this approach, Nigel Warburton The Art Question, chapter 4).

Two Thoughts

1) What about the status of the Idea in Conceptual Art? A challenge: if the ideas expressed in conceptual art are trite or unoriginal (which they often are) does that make the artwork trite? One possible answer is that the idea is an element of the work of art, not its sole purpose: the ingenuity of the way of communicating the idea is part of the work. This might be supported by the notion that if you want to communicate a complex idea writing a philosophy book or paper is usually better than making a work of conceptual art that is likely to be ignored or misunderstood by gallery goers…

2) Should we approach conceptual art with cynicism or charity? Cynicism involves a starting position that most conceptual art deals in alluding to not very profound thoughts that would be better expressed in straightforward ways, and has limited aesthetic appeal by way of consolation. Charity involves approaching these works in a more open way, starting with the working assumption that there is something worth engaging with there to be discovered. Both approaches have their dangers…

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)