art and allusion

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)

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 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 Two

Notes on Session Two of Modern Aesthetics, Tate Modern

Friedrich Nietzsche's first book The Birth of Tragedy was written while he was still somewhat in thrall to Schopenhauer's ideas (though Raymond Geuss has suggested that contemporaneous notebooks indicate that he already saw flaws in Schopenhauer's system as he was writing The Birth of Tragedy). Although ostensibly about the decline of Greek tragedy, most readers take it to have far wider significance. At its core is Nietzsche's discussion of the Dionysian and Apollonian forces at play in art and life more generally. Dionysus, god of intoxication, corresponds approximately to Schopenhauer's notion of the Will. In a Dionysian frenzy the participants lose all sense of individuality and are immersed in the life force. In contrast the Apollonian provides form, rationality and order to balance the Dionysian. A purely Dionysian art would be unsustainable. But art with a substantial Dionysian element achieves a profundity unavailable to a predominantly Apollonian art. For a short time we can lose ourselves in unity with the Dionysian force, the equivalent of the Schopenhauerian Will.

For a clear overview of Nietzsche's views on Art, listen to Aaron Ridley on Philosophy Bites (more audio interviews with philosophers on a wide range of topics are at www.philosophybites.com).

You might also be interested in a talk I gave at a Tate Modern about the influence of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche on Mark Rothko's late painting (details about how to download and navigate this audio file here.). Rothko wrote of The Birth of Tragedy 'It left an indelible impression on my mind and has forever colored the syntax of my own reflections in the questions of art' (in Writings, p.109, c 1954)

In contrast to the metaphysical theories of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (and for that matter, Plato), the novelist Leo Tolstoy's account of art in his What is Art? focuses on art as a communication between people. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche both believed that art put us in close contact with deeper levels of reality, Plato that it gave us misleading illusions at several removes from reality; Tolstoy believed that it allowed us to be infected with one anothers' emotions.

Not only was Tolstoy explicitly anti-metaphysical in his approach, but also resolutely anti-elitist. He believed that those who define art typically start from what a small subclass of society take as paradigms of art and then retrospectively conjure up theories that explain why these works really are art. Tolstoy thought this was going about things the wrong way. Instead he proposed to begin with a coherent theory and then apply it rigorously.

His theory: art is essentially a communicative act between people. Art begins from lived emotion, not from ideals of beauty or from an attempt to produce pleasure. The artist experiences an emotion and finds a way of communicating that emotion that affects the viewer by producing that same emotion. This is not simple contagion like one person yawning and others around doing the same. In Tolstoy's example, it is more like the boy who has been terrified by seeing a wolf communicating in words the situation and describing it in such a way that his listeners come to feel the fear he felt.  Great art is art that evokes intense emotion, that is simple (accessible), expresses highly individual emotions, and, most importantly, is sincere. Tolstoy saw far more virtue in simple folk music than in sophisticated classical music. Indeed, he explicitly condemned the work of Beethoven and Wagner on the basis of his theory.

Ultimately, for Tolstoy, art that is great embodies Christian values. The brotherhood of humanity can be expressed and felt through art, making art a force for good in the world.

In the Gallery

We looked at work in Tate Modern, Level 3 East 'Contemporary Art' in particular asking whether the paintings and collages there could be understood in terms of sincerely communicated emotions. For many works, this was clearly not relevant. But for several it was, notably Chris Ofili's 'No Woman No Cry' (1998). This was explicitly about grief. The stylised image of an African woman, presumably a mother, crying. Within each of her tears is a tiny image of Stephen Laurence (the victim of a violent racist attack that left him dead and which was not properly investigated by the police at the time). Although an image of a woman in grief, the emotion in the picture could plausibly be seen as communicating the artist's own emotion about Stephen Laurence's murder as well as being symbolic of grief in general. The question of the artist's sincerity does here seem relevant to our assessment of it as art. There is every indication that the emotion is genuine, both in the way the image has been made, and in background knowledge about Ofili and his approach to his art. The simplicity of statement and the use of the motifs of folk art make this a far more accessible work than those around it in the Contemporary Artists gallery. There is also every indication that Ofili is attempting through the work to communicate emotion and his feelings about the murder while suggesting broader issues about the grief of a mother's loss (and knowing that he has painted similar images of Mary is relevant here).

The point of looking at this painting in this way was not to somehow prove Tolstoy correct, nor to suggest that paintings that did not match his account were somewhow less important, but rather to entertain Tolstoy's approach to art and to see what perspectives it might give on particular paintings.

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.

Booking open for Appearances Course at Tate Modern

Appearances: Philosophy, Photography and the Self ...Booking for this course at Tate Modern in June  is now open. Booking is via the Tate Modern website or by telephone on 020 7887 8888.

Forthcoming Course on Photography at Tate Modern

Coming soon...

Appearances: philosophy, photography and the self

A 4-session course at Tate Modern

Led by Nigel Warburton, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, The Open University
2nd, 9th, 16th, 23rd  June 2008
6.45 p.m. - 8.15 p.m. followed by drinks.

What is the self? Is this something that photographs can reveal? Or is photographic portraiture merely an art of appearances? To what extent does the alleged documentary nature of photography affect our understanding of what we see?

In this 4-session course, led by philosopher and writer Nigel Warburton, participants will explore philosophical ideas about photography and the self. Sessions will include discussion of thinkers as diverse as Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, Erving Goffman, Roger Scruton and Kendall Walton. There will be opportunities for critical engagement with specific works as well as discussion of more general theoretical approaches.

Booking from early May on the Tate Modern website. These courses are usually oversubscribed, so book early if you want to come. The course will coincide with the Street and Studio exhibition.

(Read a review of Max Kozloff's new book on photographic portraiture, The Theatre of the Face)

7 Ways of Thinking About Art - Notes on Art as Original

Notes from the 6th session of Seven Ways of Thinking About Art, Tate Modern

This week we focused on two related aspects of original works of art:

1) Originals: how does knowledge that a work of art before us is an original (rather than a forgery or a copy) affect our understanding and appreciation of it?

2) Originality: what is the relevance of an artist’s creative originality, in the sense of doing something distinctively new?

These questions link back to issues we’ve discussed in previous sessions about the relevance of factual knowledge to the appreciation of works or art, and the part played by context and an artwork’s presumed aetiology (the history of how it came to be as it is).

Forgeries
Han van Meegeren, the most famous forger, painted and artificially aged early ‘Vermeers’ with great success. In particular he convinced the eminent art historian Bredius that his ‘Supper at Emmaus’ (1937) was a masterpiece by Vermeer. Van Meegeren’s success was in part based on his painting images in the style of Vermeer rather than copying particular paintings (so there was no risk of a point by point comparison of two images), by his choice of a period of Vermeer’s career from which there were few extant examples (an exception being the painting in the National Gallery of Scotland by Vermeer, Christ at the House of Martha and Mary) - there is, however, a more characteristic Vermeer forgery in the RIjkmuseum here. Once van Meegeren had had one of his forgeries accepted as original, this helped set the ‘precedent class’ of early Vermeers and acted as a touchstone for future attributions. This in part explains the art historians’ gullibility. Also, much of the attribution was conducted in war conditions, so most of the paintings which were to act as comparisons were hidden away in vaults. Van Meegeren was exposed because he had been accused of selling off national treasures to the Nazis – his confession to the lesser crime of forgery wasn’t surprising.

A recent case of forgery in the case of CD recordings, that of the pianist Joyce Hatto and her posthumous increase in reputation,  raises interesting parallel questions to the question about originality in the visual arts. For more on this, read philosopher Denis Dutton on the Joyce Hatto case.

Another interesting recent case is that of a forgery of a Gauguin sculpture of a Faun...this was only detected by tracing provenances, not by any forensic evidence about materials or stylistic evidence of incongruity.

Some people have argued that if a work has appropriate aesthetic qualities, it doesn’t matter who painted or performed it. Its beauty and profundity are all that matter. Arthur Koestler, for instance suggested that much of our preference for original works is mere snobbery.

However, the important point in the cases of both van Meegeren and Joyce Hatto is that part of our appreciation of art is an appreciation of it in the context of its being an artistic creation by a particular person at a particular time: it is not just a question of appreciating beautiful patterns, or subtle interpretations of a score. (In our earlier session on Art as Conceptual we looked at Danto and Dickie's views on the non-identity of visually indiscernible objects: the idea that two apparently identical paintings can have completely different artistic qualities because of the history of how they came to be as they are).

One reason why origins might be important could be to do with the way in which artists typically create their own repertoire of expression through their oeuvres. If Mondrian’s ‘Broadway Boogie Woogie’ turns out to have been misattributed to Mondrian when it was actually painted by Jackson Pollock in his later years, then this would be transformed from a painting expressive of joy and exuberance, to one that seemed repressed and highly controlled. If a forger successfully inserts forgeries in the style of an artist into that artist’s known repertoire, then he or she prevents the artist from communicating by changing the expressive power not only of the image in question but also distorts the whole repertoire (imagine if van Meegeren had inserted thirty ‘early Vermeers’ into Vermeer’s quite small oeuvre of paintings – we would come to see him as an artist who had turned away from religious painting for some reason, and perhaps make very different interpretations of each of the later works in the light of the earlier).

So one answer to the question ‘What is wrong with a forgery in the style of a particular artist?’ is that it can prevent that artist communicating effectively with us.

We also discussed Nelson Goodman's idea that the knowledge that a painting is a forgery actually affects what we see, that seeing isn't simply a matter of what meets the back of the eyeball, but rather as Ernst Gombrich stressed, we need to take account of  'the beholder's share', how our knowledge and beliefs affect what we see...Goodman's views on this topic are summarised here.

Further Reading

Denis Dutton has an excellent short piece 'Forgery and Plagiarism' which I strongly recommend you read if you are interested in getting an overview of the main philosophical issues here. It also provides an account of the Van Meegeren forgeries and the career of the forger Eric Hebborn.

By far the best book in this area is edited by Denis Dutton: The Forger's Art. Sadly it is currently out of print, but you might find it in a library. It contains a very interesting essay about Van Meegeren followed by all the most important recent philosophical articles on the aesthetic status of forgeries.

Alfred Lessing 'What is Wrong With A Forgery?' is reprinted in Nigel Warburton (ed.) Philosophy: Basic Readings, 2nd ed., as is Jorge Luis Borges' story 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote' which explores ideas about the non-identity of indiscernible objects...

Transformations - Notes from Session Three

TRANSFORMATIONS - Louise Bourgeois' Art about Life
notes from 3rd Dec. 2007

Memory and the Self

Memory is at the core of who we are. When we lose large amounts of our memory,  we lose parts of our self. Without memory all we have is bodily continuity, and that is not what make us an integrated and evolving person. The film-maker Luis Bunuel put this poignantly near the beginning of his autobiography:

'You have to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realise that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is not life at all...Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it we are nothing...'
Luis Bunuel

In philosophy the Seventeenth Century thinker John Locke's notion of the continuing identity of a person over time turned completely on continuity of memory rather than on bodily continuity. He came up with a famous thought experiment of the Prince and the Pauper. Imagine a pauper waking one morning with all the memories of a prince; and, likewise, in his palace, the prince waking up with all the memories of the pauper. In such a situation, Locke believes, we would say that the pauper-bodied man is really the prince and the prince-bodied person the pauper. Although in life memories and bodily continuity go together, it is the pattern of overlapping memories that make us who we are far more than the contingencies of our ever-changing bodies as we age. For Locke the notion of a person was a 'forensic' term, concerned with who was morally responsible for which action.

For Louise Bourgeois memory plays a dual role.

First, and most literally, her work is obviously driven by memories. The inciting incident of Sadie's affair with her father fuels almost everything that she has done since. Her distant past childhood is alive for her in her work, and her links to this preserve her sense of personhood. She still is the person who was rejected. These memories drive her art and are transformed in it.

But, perhaps more interestingly, her later work in a metaphorical sense 'remembers' her earlier work. There are allusions, formal and thematic to earlier pieces, old subjects are re-visited and re-modelled. This is most apparent in the final room of the current exhibition where small pieces from different periods of her life are juxtaposed - there are remarkable continuities and subtle variations on what she had previously done. The femme maison, for example, recurrs as drawing, small sculpture, the spider as motif keeps coming back, as does the spiral. Like real memories, the echo of the earlier work makes us re-evaluate what has gone before. It also ties her apparently diverse work together and integrates it, so that it can be seen as all part of her artistic self.  And, like real memories too, the symbolic representations of past events, and past interpretations of events, involve transformations, transformations that take her work beyond therapy or outsider art.