art and allusion

Tate Modern Course: Anguish, Absurdity Death - Notes from Session 4

Anguish, Absurdity, Death (Tate Modern, strictly by ticket only, sold out).

Monday evenings, Tate Modern, Level 7 East Room, 18.45 – 20.15 Followed by drinks in Members’ Room, Level 6, 20.15-20.50.

Week 1. Monday June 11^th.  Level 5 ‘Setting the Scene’, Turbine Hall ‘For the Love of God’

Week 2. Monday June 18th. Level 3 Damien Hirst, rooms 1-10

Week 3. Monday 25^th June.  Level 3 West, ‘Poetry and Dream’

Week 4. Monday 2^nd July. Edvard Munch, 

Week 5. Monday 9^th July. Edvard Munch 

Notes from Session 4

For this session we focussed on human relations, and in particular love and desire, as described by Jean-Paul Sartre. The point of the discussion was to provide an angle on some of Edvard Munch's paintings - a way of exploring the implied human relations between depicted lovers, and also the painter/viewer.

In Being and Nothingness Sartre gives a somewhat bleak description of the nature of human relationships. Although Sartre's existentialism begins from the subjective viewpoint, Sartre is no solipsist - his example of the voyeur looking through a keyhole being transfigured into awareness of himself as a 'looked at look' is intended to demonstrate to us how much through emotions such as shame we are committed to awareness of the existence of others as centres of their own consciousness and corresponding freedom.

Relationships involve a struggle between conscious beings each presenting themselves to the other in a way that they hope will make them attractive, but constantly at risk either of turning the Other into something less than a free individual, or else, in Bad Faith, of becoming fixed as a self for the Other, in a kind of assimilation into the other person, which ultimately is a form of masochism (in death we become prey to the other - perhaps we should say that in love we constantly risk becoming prey to the lover)...or else sadism (when we seek to curb the other's freedom).

According to Sartre, the lover wants his or her facticity to be necessary not contingent: we are thrown into a meaningless existence by chance and there is much about us that we did not choose, yet there is a widespread desire to be more than an absurd empty consciousness that we fill through our commitments. For Sartre the lover wants to take on the role of God according to the Ontological Argument (the argument for the existence of God that makes God's existence necessary - by definition): for the one who loves us, each of us wants the contingent aspects of what we are to seem as if they had to be so - no other individual could take our place. Described in this way, this is a hopeless wish - given that, at least according to Sartre, our existence is in no way necessary.

Sexual desire, for Sartre, is not simply an animal instinct, but is desire for engagement with animated flesh, bodies as conscious. Something as apparently straightforward as a caress, for Sartre, takes us straight to metaphysical reflection and awareness of our own facticity.

Disentangling Sartre's dense account of love and desire in the section 'Concrete Relations with Others' in Being and Nothingness (both terrifyingly abstract and at times disconcertingly concrete) is no easy task - perhaps ultimately it is confused and contradictory. For more straightforward analysis of sexual desire (influenced in both cases by Sartre), try Thomas Nagel's 'Sexual Perversion' in his book Mortal Questions (but remember that 'perversion' isn't a term of moral condemnation for Nagel here) and Roger Scruton's book Sexual Desire (at times idiosyncratic, occasionally moralistic,  but nevertheless a serious attempt to make sense of our lived experience in this area - his appendix 'The First Person' gives a clear critique of some of the assumptions of phenomenology, and he summarises and discusses what he calls the 'paradox of lust' - Sartre's view that we both want to engage sexually with flesh incarnated with freedom, yet at the same time want to possess and fix the lover -  on pp120-125).

In the gallery we looked at some of the works in Room 2 of  Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye exhibition at Tate Modern - paintings which in their implied reading of human relationships and desire resonated with the Sartrean themes we had been discussing.

Tate Modern Course: Anguish, Absurdity, Death - notes from session 3

Anguish, Absurdity, Death (Tate Modern, strictly by ticket only, sold out).

Monday evenings, Tate Modern, Level 7 East Room, 18.45 – 20.15 Followed by drinks in Members’ Room, Level 6, 20.15-20.50.

Week 1. Monday June 11^th.  Level 5 ‘Setting the Scene’, Turbine Hall ‘For the Love of God’

Week 2. Monday June 18th. Level 3 Damien Hirst, rooms 1-10

Week 3. Monday 25^th June.  Level 3 West, ‘Poetry and Dream’

Week 4. Monday 2^nd July. Edvard Munch, and part of Hirst

Week 5. Monday 9^th July. Edvard Munch 

Notes from Session Three

Images and Imagining

In this session we focussed on Jean-Paul Sartre's view of the phenomenology of looking at images and of imagining. In his stimulating book The Imaginary, Sartre investigates the experience of experiencing images - ranging from mental images to photographs. 

As a phenomenologist, Sartre was very interested in giving an accurate and detailed account of what experience is actually like, what, in this case, it feels like to imagine something that isn't present, or to look at a photograph of a friend. This interrogation of his own experience was at the heart of Sartre's existentialism, and, when successful, is what makes it so appealing (unlike, in my view, the prickly abstractions and re-using of Hegelian and Heideggerian jargon, which make his writing so hard to follow for the uninitiated - and probably for the initiated too). But it would be wrong to see Sartre as obsessed with introspection: for him consciousness is smeared across the world - when we think, we always think about something (this is the special meaning of 'intentionality' in this context - thoughts are intentional means thoughts are always directed at something beyond them), and our consciousness is filled with the world, not with a little internal picture gallery representing the world.

For 17th and 18th century thinkers like Locke and Hume, experience creates images which we somehow view internally. Sartre rejects this model completely. Even when we experience a physical representation, such as a photograph of a friend, our experience isn't straightforwardly of that depiction.

For Sartre, the act of experiencing a depiction is that of animating an analgon (a representation). If I look at a photograph of Pierre, after a while I no longer experience the photograph as a physical object, but am carried beyond the physical object the photograph - my conscious experience isn't of a photograph, but of Pierre, and not just Pierre snapped for 1/100th of a second, but Pierre himself. He is experienced as absent, though.

Another important aspect of Sartre's descriptions of consciousness is the way in which what is not present can be part of our experience. If you go to a café looking for a friend and that friend isn't there, then you perceive the friend's absence, even though there is no physical stimulus corresponding to that. 

If you are interested in questions about imagination and mental images, then I recommend Colin McGinn's very readable and stimulating book (which discusses and builds on some of Sartre's ideas) Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning:

In the gallery we looked at Giorgio de Chirico's 'The Uncertainty of the Poet' - as an experiment considering it as a painting that dealt not just with what was depicted, but also with absences, the absence of people in imaginary spaces that look as if they should be inhabited - a source of the uncanny mood of the painting. We also considered two sculptures that, unlike most of the works we examine in this course, were probably directly influenced by existentialist thought: Germaine Richier's 'Diabolo' - which, with its strings tying the figure to the ground, hints strongly at themes of freedom and constraint - and Water (this suggesed questions about the images others project on to women, activity and passivity). Both sculptures, like many of the quintessential existential artist Giacommetti's, are single figures apparently alone - indeed the subjective starting point of the individual forced to make choices in a world without pre-existing values 'condemned to be free' is typically expressed artistically through lone figures. For Sartre we are all alone without excuses - and alone in the sense of 'abandoned' by God (meaning 'God is dead', non-existent)...and in our interactions with others we are frequently on the brink of falling into positions of sadism or masochism - in the words uttered by a character in his play 'N0 Exit': 'Hell is other people'

For other work directly influenced by existentialism and on the cultural impact generally of French existentialism, see this catalogue Paris Post War: Art and Existentialism 1945-1955:

Tate Modern Course: Anguish, Absurdity Death - Notes & Links from Session 2

Anguish, Absurdity, Death (Tate Modern, strictly by ticket only, sold out).

Monday evenings, Tate Modern, Level 7 East Room, 18.45 – 20.15 Followed by drinks in Members’ Room, Level 6, 20.15-20.50.

Week 1. Monday June 11^th.  Level 5 ‘Setting the Scene’, Turbine Hall ‘For the Love of God’

Week 2. Monday June 18th. Level 3 Damien Hirst, rooms 1-10

Week 3. Monday 25^th June.  Level 3 West, ‘Poetry and Dream’

Week 4. Monday 2^nd July. Edvard Munch, and part of Hirst

Week 5. Monday 9^th July. Edvard Munch 

Notes from Session One

Aims of the course:

• To think about and discuss some key themes in existentialism
• To view works in Tate Modern (especially by Damien Hirst and Edvard Munch) from an existentialist perspective

This week's topic was Death, a theme dear to  existentialists, but one that has preoccupied philosophers frequently throughout the subject's history. It is also a subject that preoccupies the artist Damien Hirst, whose Tate Modern exhibition we visited.

Epicurus on Fear of Death

The Greek Epicurus (the inappropriate source of the word 'epicurean') was one of the most interesting of the ancient philosophers to have thought about death (his ideas about death in Lucretius's poem 'On the Nature of Things' - there is an excellent translation of this by Dryden - listen to a short podcast with Stephen Greenblatt on Lucretius). He was particularly keen to eliminate fear of death, which he felt ruined many people's lives. In his view fear of death was irrational, and could be significantly reduced by thinking clearly about the topic. His main arguments were these: first, most people make the mistake of imagining their own deaths as if they will be present and able to observe them. But death, as the extinction of consciousness, means that it isn't something that we could possibly experience or feel bad about at the time. We can experience the process of dying, but the moment of death removes us from the world. The 20th Century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously declared along similar lines:

'Death is not an event in life.'

Epicurus's second argument was about asymmetry: most of us don't wory about the eons befre our births; why the get so worked up about all the time after our deaths when we won't exist any more. We could have been born a month or so earlier, but that loss of time doesn't worry many people; why worry about when we die? 

Epicurus's epitaph neatly sums up this philosophy (which will only work if you believe that death does involve extinction of consciousness - if you believe in life after death in some form, it may not have any effect):

'I was not; I have been; I am not; I don't mind'

Jean-Paul Sartre on My Death

Sartre, writing in the 1940s in Being and Nothingness, took a rather different line about death. Consistent with his phenomenological approach he focussed on the subjective point of view, on the questions about death that arise from the individual contemplating his or her own death, rather than death viewed objectively from outside.

As an atheist he did not believe that death had been given any significance or meaning from outside the individual perspective. There is for Sartre no God and no afterlife. But he also completely rejected one humanist view of death as the equivalent of the final chord in life that brings the piece to a close not just with finality, but by somehow making sense of all that has gone before. For Sartre it is clear that death is absurd - an aspect of our contingency: we find oursleves thrown into a world we didn't choose, with no pre-existing values that are binding on us, forced to carve out values through our choices, and constrained by our facticity, which includes death. Death is simply a given (though we wouldn't have known that it was on the cards for us if there had not been other people around who die). The fact of my own future death contributes nothing to the meaning of my acts - it will not (as Epicurus noted) be something I experience. Our finitude comes not from death so much, but from the fact that we make our choices in time, and that each moment of choice can never be revisited. Death is not one of my possibilities - it is an absurd given, but not something that is part of me as a conscious choosing free being.

For Sartre all meaning for any act is created by the choosing individual. When you cease to be able to choose (at death), your life loses meaning from within. At every turn while alive you could re-evaluate your past, make choices in the present that affect the meaning of your previous choices, metamorphose, or decline. When you are dead 'the chips are down.' But that doesn't mean that your life's meaning is fixed at that point. Rather you as creator of meaning are no longer present. Your life is in other people's hands from then on, your life becomes 'Prey to the Other' and its meaning and significance may be transformed completely. He talks of the Other 'triumphing' over the individual at the point of his or her death - a view consistent with his bleak account of social relations as tending to fall into either masochism or sadism, with an me/them struggle to perserve authenticity in the face of people trying to impose their will or desires on to me. At death I will be turned from a choosing individual to an object for other people - another aspect of  'Hell is other people' 

In the Gallery
We visited the Rooms 1 - 10 of the Tate Modern Damien Hirst show, an exhibition centred on the theme of death.  We had previously seen 'For the Love of God', the jewel encrusted cast of a skull, with real teeth, that drew world press attention when it was vauled at £50 million. It is plausible to see that work as being not just a game-playing gesture directed at the art market, but also as  in the memento mori or vanitas tradition - the art work frequently featuring skulls, that drew attention to the inevitability of death, and the need to focus on living because of the ultimate future awaiting us all (see, for example Frans Hals painting of a young man, Hamlet-like, holding a skull, or the anamorphic skull in Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors - both in London's National Gallery).

Many of us felt that the photograph of Hirst grinning next to a severed head 'With Dead Head' with its disrespect for the remains of someone who presumably donated his body to medical science and whose family may recognize him, was offensive and immoral and raised the issue why this sort of image was treated as acceptable within Tate Modern, but would have caused outrage had it had been taken in a military situation (an interesting piece on the topic of trophy-taking and laughing at corpses in war here). On this question, some people believe that artistic merit (assuming this particular piece by Hirst has it, which is debatable) should exempt work that would otherwise fall foul of censorship laws (that was essentially the legal decision in the Lady Chatterley's Lover case). I disagree. The philosopher Bernard Williams made the point nicely that such a view is confused: if you want to protect creative activity from censorship, you should also protect the right to make unsuccessful experiments (i.e. achieved artistic merit shouldn't give you a joker card - artists need to be able to attempt works that fail artistically). Special retrospective merit-based legal exemption from censorship is a model that is bad for artistic creativity - as Williams put it in his essay 'Censorship' (p.144): 'If one believes in freedom for artistic merit, then one believes in freedom and accepts censorship only on the narrowest  of grounds'. Applying this reasoning to Hirst's 'With Dead Head' would mean that it should be treated like any other photograph of someone playing around with a corpse - probably the image-making shouldn't be illegal, and it is better to tolerate a degree of freedom that allows for immoral image-making - but even if the image had great artistic merit, that would not be a major consideration in relation to its legality). 

Tate Modern Course: Anguish, Absurdity Death - Notes & Links from Session 1

Anguish, Absurdity, Death (Tate Modern, strictly by ticket only, sold out).

Monday evenings, Tate Modern, Level 7 East Room, 18.45 – 20.15 Followed by drinks in Members’ Room, Level 6, 20.15-20.50.

Week 1. Monday June 11^th.  Level 5 ‘Setting the Scene’, Turbine Hall ‘For the Love of God’

Week 2. Monday June 18th. Level 3 Damien Hirst, rooms 1-10

Week 3. Monday 25^th June.  Level 3 West, ‘Poetry and Dream’

Week 4. Monday 2^nd July. Edvard Munch, and part of Hirst

Week 5. Monday 9^th July. Edvard Munch 

Notes from Session One

Aims of the course:

• To think about and discuss some key themes in existentialism
• To view works in Tate Modern (especially by Damien Hirst and Edvard Munch) from an existentialist perspective

 What is Existentialism?

 A philosophical and literary movement that emerged from Paris in the 1940s and is particularly associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The term 'existentialist' was probably first used by Gabriel Marcel of Sartre in 1943 (Sartre then rejected the term, but later accepted it). Sartre was very influenced by Martin Heidegger and by Soren Kierkegaard and to some extent Friedrich Nietzsche, all of whom have subsequently been declared existentialists retrospectively (at least in some aspects of their works). Other prominent existentialist thinkers who were contemporaries of Sartre include Albert Camus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. 

What do existentialists have in common? Not necessarily very much (you might want to see it as a 'family resemblance term' - digression: a brief summary of what Wittgenstein meant by 'family resemblance term').

Here's what Sartre said, though, in a famous public lecture 'Existentialism is a Humanism' (mysteriously translated as 'Existentialism and Humanism') given in October 1945: what existentialists have in common is that they believe that for human beings 'existence precedes essence'. (For an explanation of this and more discussion of this lecture/book download this short article Existentialism). Sartre was an atheist and didn't believe that God had created human beings (we are 'abandoned') - so, unlike with a penknife (his example) - there is no pre-existing essence of what it is to be a human being. We find oursleves 'thrown' into existence, and only then define what it is to be human (he rejected the idea that there is such a thing as 'human nature' that shapes how we have to be, or that biology defines humanity). We are free - far freer than most of us realise, according to Sartre. We choose even our own emotions. The brute facts of the world (where and when we were born, who our parents are, etc. he describes as 'facticity', but we transcend this through our thought).  The anguish of existence is that we have to create values for ourselves, choose them,  rather than discover what they are. Add to this his belief that a human being is simply the sum of what he or she actually does, not what he or she might have done, and we see that there are no 'mute inglorious Miltons' in his world. We have to commit to doing something - inaction is still something we are responsible for. But this anguish is intensified, according to Sartre, by his belief that 'In fashioning myself, I fashion man' (i.e. humanity). In choosing for myself I create an image of what a human being should be like. If I choose not to choose (which for him is still definitely a choice) and accept a life 'off the peg' as it were, that is a form of Bad Faith (self-deception that involves a denial of my own freedom). We can't seek help outside of ourselves because any help we get about how we should live still needs to be interpreted and chosen or rejected: 'we are alone without excuses'. 

For a general introduction to Existentialism listen to this short interview with Mary Warnock, who is no longer particularly sympathetic to the Sartrean philosophy: Mary Warnock on Existentialism

For a discussion of Sartre's concept of Bad Faith, listen to Sebastian Gardner on Sartre on Bad Faith. Gardner discusses the theme as it emerges in Sartre's book Being and Nothingness, which has been described as the bible of existentialism (it is, unfortunately, though, a difficult read, with occasional lucid novel-like passages among pages of jargon-laden prose - if you plan to read it, you will probably want to read it alongside a commentary, such as the one Sebastian Gardner has written, or Joseph Catalano's).

There is a useful overview of Existentialism here (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - a generally reliable source).

For those interested in learning about Jean-Paul Sartre the man, the documentary 'Roads to Freedom' (49 minutes) below is one place to start:

In the Gallery

In the gallery we first visited 'Setting the Scene' (Level 5) and looked at 3 works: Liliana Porter's 'Forced Labour ll', Deimantas Narkevicius' 'Never Backwards', and Dexter Dalwood's 'Situationist Apartment, May 1968'

We then visited Damien Hirst's 'For the Love of God' see video below. This was a prelude to next week's discussion of the theme 'My Death' in relation to the Damien Hirst exhibition. 

'Every art work that has ever interested me is about death' Damien Hirst (from the video below)

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