art and allusion

7 Ways of Thinking About Art: Notes from Sesssion 3

Download handout for course '7 Ways of Thinking about Art' (attendance ticket only, sold out)

Notes from Session 1

Notes from Session 2

Session 3: Art as Historical

This week we conisdered art from the perspective of historical style. Historical style contrasts with individual style. When thinking about an artist's intentions, individual style is typically achieved through a range of conscious, semi-conscious and non-conscious interventions and decisions resulting in a distinctive and recognizable approach. These might involve not just the 'how' 0f brushstroke and media, but also the 'what' of subject matter selection (so, for example, Giorgio Morandi's obsessive focus on painting  vases, and bottles on a shelf is an aspect of his individual style). So there is no style/content dichotomy.

We understand an artist's individual style in part through examining a range of that artist's work - that is what allows us to recognize the patterns of decisions and to distinguish the accidental and incidental from the core choices. What typically emerges is an artistic personality, or rather an implied personality, with a take on the world.

Some thinkers argue that to have an individual style is an artistic achievement, that 'style' is an evaluative term, in contrast to the use of 'style' to mean something like 'trademark'. A connoisseur can make accurate attributions based on features of an artist's work (such as how he or she paints ears), which may contribute little or nothing to the artist's style in the evaluative sense, but which are, rather simply recognizable features that give away the authorship - the equivalent of a fingerprint. The difficult issue then is to say which features of an artist's work are stylistic features in the evaluative sense (though that might well be the job of the critic to make such decisions).

Attributions aren't just of interest for those inolved in the art market - they are crucial to our assessment of the expressive properties of a particular work. So, as Ernst Gombrich pointed out in his book Art and Illusion, knowing that 'Broadway Boogie-Woogie' was painted  by Piet Mondrian (in 1942-3 when he had come to New York after escaping from Europe and from war) and that Mondrian's typical output in later years was far more austere, we will read the work as expressing a certain kind of abandon and delight. Had it been attributed to another artist, (Gombrich uses the example of Severini, the Futurist), our understanding would be very different. Imagine, for example that it turned out to have been painted by Jackson Pollock - then it would seem peculiarly reserved...

This week we were in Tate Britain, and that gave us a chance to look at works from the perspective of a historical style, in this case Romanticism. Romanticism (like Modernism) was a movement that found expression across a wide range of the arts, and which was in large part a reaction to the optimistic rationality of some aspects of the Englightenment and to Ne0-Classicism - it flourished in the early to mid- ninteenth century, but had its roots in 18th century thinking. In painting, it was characterised by, amongst other things, a concern with natural elemental forces - Romantic artists were not attempting accurate mirrors held up to nature, but rather expressed their subjective and often turbulent emotional responses to the world. The artist was seen as an original genius, typically misunderstood, and outside of the mainstream, but with the courage to follow his or her own path. In landscape painting Romantic artists were often influenced by the idea of the sublime rather than the beautiful. The notion of the sublime was resurrected and given philosophical coherence by Edmund Burke's book, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime of 1757. 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. Burke gave clear expression to idea that beauty may not be the only quality in nature and art that moves us profoundly. He 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'. 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, 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 Tate Britain we visited the exhibition The Romantics, and partiularly the room Pictures for an Exhibition. Many of these pictures drew on the notion of the sublime, the viewer put in the position of being overwhelmed by natural phenomena, whether a mountain, or a thunder storm, or the force of an avalanche. Where figures were present, they were tiny in comparison to the elemental forces. Seeing these pictures as part of a school drew attention to different features than if, for example, we had seen each as formal arrangements (Clive Bell's approach). We also visited the room devoted to the so-called Neo-Romantics, painters such as Graham Sutherland, Paul Nash, and John Piper, who, painting in the 193os and 1940s, referred back in some ways (sometimes through explicit allusion, sometimes through parallel approach) to Romanticism. In this case the consensus of the group seemed to be that approaching the work through the notion of a period school was less useful than for 'Pictures for an Exhibition', and that many of the interesting aspects of these paintings had relatively tenuous links to Romanticism  (looking ahead to week 7 of this course, there are interesting issues raised her about the curator's share - the extent to which the grouping of these works as examples of a historical school highlights particular features of the paintings at the expense of others).

Next week: back to Tate Modern for Art as Material

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.