virtual philosopher

7 Ways of Thinking About Art - Tate Modern

I will be leading a course on the Philosophy of Art at Tate Modern -  Seven Ways of Thinking About Art - on Monday evenings 6.30- 8pm,  4th February - 17th March this year (followed by a drink in the bar from 8pm). If you are interested in attending you should book soon as these courses sell out quite quickly. I'll be posting notes from the course on my other weblog Art and Allusion. This course is a mixture of classroom discussion and looking at works of art in the gallery after the public have left (a privilege in itself).

You can get an idea of the sorts of topics covered in this course and my approach by looking at my notes from the last time I taught the course here. We won't necessarily be looking at the same works for the upcoming course.

This course is also the basis of a book I am writing with the same name...but don't hold your breath.

Tate Modern Course on Louise Bourgeois - Advance Warning

Transformations: Louise Bourgeois’ Art About Life

Led by Nigel Warburton. Venue: Tate Modern.
Monday evenings 19th Nov.- 10th Dec. 2007. Booking details now available from Tate Modern.

This 4-session course investigates Louise Bourgeois’ art from a philosophical angle. Rather than dwelling on art historical connections, participants will have the opportunity to explore and discuss her work through the key themes of Life into Art, the Ambivalent Body, Transforming Pain, and Artistic Style. Bourgeois has declared that her work is about life: this course will provide a framework within which to examine that claim in the presence of the wide range of her art assembled for the major retrospective exhibition at Tate Modern. Each session will focus on a single theme, triggered by Bourgeois work, but will also address wider issues about the nature of art and expression.

Tate Modern Course: Seven Ways of Thinking About Art - a few places still available

There are still some places available on my course 'Seven Ways of Thinking About Art'. The course is held on seven consecutive Monday evenings from 5th Feb. 6.30 p.m. - 8 p.m. and is followed by a free drink in the Tate Modern first floor cafe bar.  The sessions consist of c45 minutes in a spectacular classroom - possibly the best classroom in the world -  overlooking St Paul's and the Globe Theatre, followed by c45 minutes in part of the galleries after they have been closed to the public, applying philosophical ideas to specific works there. Each week, we will consider a different stance towards works of art (e.g. as expressions of their creators' intentions, as objects which invite unconstrained subjective reactions, or as part of the museum's rhetoric etc.). No prior knowledge of philosophy or art is needed. The people who've signed up for these courses in the past have been very diverse in their backgrounds and interests, and this has made for very interesting debate. My aim is to introduce some key philosophical ideas about our engagement with works of art, and to explore and discuss them in relation to particular works in the collection

Book online here

Earlier post on teaching at Tate Modern...

I will be posting summaries and suggestions for further readings, links etc. regularly on this weblog.

Course at Tate Modern: 7 Ways of Thinking About Art

Booking for my course 7 Ways of Thinking About Art (Tate Modern, Monday evenings 6.30-8.00p.m. followed by a free drink in the bar) is now open on the Tate Modern website. Sessions take place in a teaching room, followed by discussion in the gallery making use of the Tate Modern collection after it has been closed to the public.

This seven-week course explores the philosophical basis of our attempts to understand works of art. Topics covered include the question of whether works of art are simply catalysts to purely subjective responses, the relevance of an artist's intentions, a work’s historical context, its originality, and its context within the gallery.

Participants have the opportunity to explore a range of positions from a theoretical perspective and to test their application against particular works of art in the gallery.

Places are limited, so early booking is advisable.

See earlier post on teaching at Tate Modern...

Art and Philistinism

Here is an honest reaction to Cornelia Parker's ‘The Distance (a kiss with string attached)’ Parker had carefully wrapped Auguste Rodin’s sculpture ‘The Kiss’ in string. It is from M. Simmons, who, in a letter published in METRO, (Thursday Feb. 27, 2003) wrote:.

‘I cannot begin to describe how angry I am about Cornelia Parker’s string tied around Rodin’s beautiful work of art The Kiss.’

He/she does in fact go on to reveal how angry he/she is, and also makes the following critical judgment of the work:

‘It is indeed a load of crap [then makes a point about the nature of art]  but the public should not be surprised at what the Tate calls art. Just look at the bricks, the unmade bed, the lights that go on on their own (which, incidentally, happens in our office and has done for the last ten years) and so on.’

It is easy to make fun of such comments. But they are sincere and raise interesting questions.

This was the starting point for a talk I gave at Tate Britain in 2003 when my book The Art Question came out. Extract from this book.

The full draft of my talk can be downloaded here [24KB rtf] Download art_and_philistinism.rtf

The Wisdom of Groups: On Teaching at Tate Modern

One of the biggest surprises to me about teaching philosophy of art courses at Tate Modern has been the pleasure and insights that come from a diverse group of people spending time looking at works of art. Before teaching in this way my prejudices were all for solitary introspective engagement with art, perhaps with a discussion afterwards. I’m still usually happier going around an exhibition on my own rather than with other people. Reading about the artist and art historical context can (but not always) enhance this experience. But there is a lot more to be said for experiencing and discussing works of art in a medium-sized group than I realised. Now I have a suggestion about why this might be so.

In his book The Wisdom of Crowds, subtitled ‘Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few’, James Surowiecki explains how in many situations a diverse group can provide more insight than even a panel of experts. The group can be more insightful and cleverer than any individual member. His line is that there are several conditions that ideally need to be met for this to work. First, you need a group which contains a diversity of opinion – this is one reason, it seems to me that the group teaching at Tate Modern can produce reactions to art that are interesting and stimulating: there is no one type of person who attends these courses – it isn’t as if every student is just someone who spends a lot of time looking at art (though many are), someone interested in learning more about the Tate Modern collection (many are)  an artist or photographer (some are), someone working in the City (some are)  a writer (some are), or someone who was studied philosophy (some are). The point is that every group of 35 students contains people from a wide range of backgrounds with very different experience, expectations, age, motivation etc. The result is that there is a much wider range of reaction to ideas and to works of art than would be typical of a more conventional course. The second requirement in Surowiecki’s view is for the group members to have genuine independence in the sense that they can make their own minds up without being unduly influenced by group pressure. Because these courses take place for a few hours a week and most of the students don’t encounter each other outside these hours, and because they are adults from very different backgrounds, there is a great deal of independence of view. A further ideal requirment according to Surowiekci is that there should be a degree of decentralisation in the way decisions are reached. As I understand this, the Tate Modern teaching facilitates this to some degree because much of the discussion of works of art and ideas takes place in smaller sub-groups. Lastly Surowiecki thinks that a suitable method of aggregation of ideas is necessary. This is a tougher one, but there are often plenary discussions where ideas and interpretations can be shared.

I’m not certain that Surowiecki’s theoretical framework explains this completely, but I have certainly been surprised by the power of group interaction with art works in these courses. In some cases it has completely transformed my understanding of particular works of art in the Tate Modern collection.

The Private Language Argument in a Sentence

There are numerous interpretations of precisely what Wittgenstein's Private Language argument is, where it begins and ends in Philosophical Investigations, what its target is, and whether it is successful...so it was nice to discover Stewart Candlish's one sentence summary of it in Edward Craig (ed.) The Shorter Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

' ...a language in principle unintelligible to anyone but its user would necessarily be unintelligible to the user also, because no meanings could be established for its signs'

I've had a go at a short summary in my book Philosophy: The Classics too...

Wittgenstein and the Beetle in the Box

In Philosophical Investigations (1.293) Wittgenstein introduces a famous and memorable analogy: the beetle in the box. Suppose everyone has a box that only they can see into. No one can see into anyone else's box. Each describes what he or she sees in the box as a 'beetle'. I know what a beetle is from my own examination of what is in my box, you from yours. Wittgenstein points out that in this situation while we all talk about our beetles, there might be different things in everyone's boxes, or perhaps nothing at all in some of them. The thing in the box, could be changing all the time. Whatever it is, he maintains that it cannot have a part in the 'language-game'. Analogously (and this is only implied rather than fully spelt out by Wittgenstein), if I say that I know what 'pain' means from personal introspection, on the model of what he calls 'object and designation' - like the ostensive definition (or, as non-philosophers put it, pointing) that tells us 'that's a cat' when I point at the furry animal in the garden - then whatever 'internal' object Im pointing at (the equivalent of the cat) drops out of consideration. It is irrelevant to the meaning of 'pain'. It is like the beetle that may or may not be in the box.

This is part of Wittgenstein's so-called Private Language Argument (of which there are numerous competing interpretations). The gist of this is that the assumption that introspection governs the meaning of our sensation language is false: language is rule-governed public behaviour (though, perhaps perversely, Wittgenstein denied that he was a logical behaviourist, though some of his interpreters find this disengenuous). Language is far more enmeshed with the world and our forms of life than those who (perhaps influenced by Descartes and his legacy) see the mind as essentially a private theatre would have us believe...

This post relates to the course Philosophy in the Gallery at Tate Modern.

These links are useful for an overview of Wittgenstein's life and philosophy:

The Philosophers Magazine

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Wikipedia

Numerous further links at episteme.com

Wittgenstein, Aspect Seeing, Rothko

In Part 11 of Philosophical Investigations one of Wittgenstein’s themes is aspect seeing. His best known example is of the duck-rabbit – a puzzle picture that can be seen either as a duck looking to the left, or as a rabbit looking upwards and to the right. The sudden awareness of the previously unseen animal in the picture is an example of what Wittgenstein calls ‘the dawning of an aspect’. The visual stimulus doesn’t change. The retinal image that we have is presumably also unchanged. Yet we suddenly see what we thought was just a duck as a rabbit. This example emphasises the degree to which seeing is linked with expectation and concepts and is far from the passive reception of incoming visual data that some early empiricists believed it to be (Hans-Johann Glock in his A Wittgenstein Dictionary p.37  calls this ‘concept-saturatedness of perception’).

What’s This Got to Do With a Course At Tate Modern?

There are parallels between the experience of aspect dawning that Wittgenstein describes and the experience of being jolted into appreciating a new aspect of a work of art. For example, the common experience of Mark Rothko’s Seagram Murals in  Tate Modern as tranquil objects of meditative and serene contemplation can be transformed if you learn the degree to which he intended his painting to be Dionysian glimpses into the abyss at the edge of what can be tolerated. For instance, in his biography of Rothko (p.355) James Breslin quotes Rothko (p.355):

‘I would like to say to those who think of my pictures as serene […] that I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface.’

Learning this can be the equivalent of suddenly seeing the puzzle picture as a rabbit when you have only previously seen it as a duck. You see the same paintings, but they now have a menacing rather than tranquil air.

For a brief overview of some of the main themes of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, see chapter 26 of the third edition of my book Philosophy: The Classics.

Wittgenstein, Family Resemblance, Art

One of the ways in which we can get bewitched by language is by assuming that if we correctly use a word in a range of contexts, there must be some common essence shared by the things we refer to. Wittgenstein uses the example of 'game'. One approach to defining 'game' would be to look for all the non-trivial features that  are shared by the things we call games. But to assume that there must be some underlying essence of all games, is, Wittgenstein tells us, a mistake. Instead of the single uniting feature, what we find if we actually 'look and see' is a complex pattern of overlapping resemblances between games. He coined the term 'family resemblance' to refer to this pattern: this a reference to the visual resemblances between genetically related members of a family. Often such relations don't share a single distinctive feature, but rather one is like another in hair colour, others have similar eye colour or cheekbones, etc. So that as with games there is simply this complex pattern of overlapping visual resemblances (albeit with an underlying genetic cause). The key passages where he discusses this idea are in Philosophical Investigations (1.66 and 1.67).

This approach is anti-essentialist in that Wittgenstein rejects the idea that all concepts appropriately used refer to a common underlying essence that make that thing what it is. That view was, for example, explicit in Plato's notion of the Forms.

A number of philosophers, notably Maurice Weitz, applied the notion of a family resemblance term to the question 'What is Art?' Weitz diagnosed the difficulty that previous philosophers had had with defining art as arising out of a misplaced quest for the essence of art. An example of a writer who assumed that art must have an essence is Clive Bell, the Bloomsbury critic, who in his book Art (1914) declared that '...either all works of visual art have some common quality, or when we speak of 'works of art' we gibber' (p.7-8). A Wittgensteian would point out that this a false dichotomy: that there is a third option, namely that art is a family resemblance term.

For a discussion of neo-Wittgensteinian theories of art, see Nigel Warburton The Art Question (Routledge, 2003) Chapter 3.

These links are useful for an overview of Wittgenstein's life and philosophy:

The Philosophers Magazine

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Wikipedia

Numerous further links at episteme.com