art and allusion

Playing with Meaning (session 4) - notes and links

For the 4th session of Playing with Meaning we re-visited the Paul Klee exhibition at Tate Modern, exploring the possibility of describing the works entirely in musical terms. Klee was himself a talented violinist, and his parents and wife were all musicians. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke even wrote this of him:

    Even if you hadn’t told me he plays the violin, I would have guessed that on many occasions his     drawings were transcriptions of music."

So the idea that music was an influence on Klee, in various ways, has historical backing. The point of the excercise was in part to explore the idea of aspect seeing - the notion that the same physical object can be seen in very different ways depending on our mental set. Ludwig Wittgenstein famously used the Duck-Rabbit picture to illustrate this (for illustrations of duck-rabbits see 9 examples of the duck-rabbit, also this article about the claim to have found the oldest pictorial illusion). Wittgenstein's discussion is in Part ll of Philosophical Investigations. 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’). 

Last night's exercise also was an illustration of a game in the sense of its involving the voluntary acceptance of unnecesary obstacles to achieving an end (see last week's notes about Bernard Suits' account of games), rather than of unstructured play.

The exercise worked well, and resulted in different sorts of attention - we found visual analogues for rhythm, tone, scales, accent, key, echo, modulation, musical genre, and much more in Klee's work, and generally we spent more time discussing non-representational aspects of pictures than we might otherwise have done. It was also fun.

Playing with Meaning (session 3) - notes and links

For session three of Playing with Meaning we further explored some of Arthur Danto's ideas about what art is. In particular we considered his notion that art is about something - contrasting this aspect of his account with George Dickie's Institutional Theory of Art which, in its simplest form stated that a work of art is an artifact some aspects of which have had the status 'candidate for appreciation' conferred upon it. Danto's approach is often confused with Dickie's, but he always distanced himself from the way Dickie approached this question. Dickie was only interested in the term 'art' used in a purely descriptive way (i.e. without implying any evaluation whatsover). Unlike Danto, he had no stipulation that a work of art needed to have a subject whatsoever.

In the Tate Modern galleries we discussed several works which quite clearly had subject matter. For example, Hrair Sarkissian's 'Execution Squares' 2008, described here, large scale photographs of empty squares in Syria where executions have taken place, clearly are about something. Interestingly, despite being photgraphs, the subject matter is as much what is not in front of the lens, as it is what actually is there. We discussed these images as examples of the way in which, as Jean-Paul Sartre noticed, our consciousness of things isn't straightforwardly of what we see - in Sartre's example he goes to a café to meet Pierre, but Pierre isn't there - his entire experience of the café is of absence, of concrete nothingness.... We interpret what these photographs are about in the light of context, knowledge, and appearance. The subject matter of the photograph is not what was in front of the lens when the shutter fell, but rather a contribution of the photographer who used the images to explore a viewpoint on a theme.

You might be interested in this discussion of Thomas Demand's work which picks up on this notion of photgraphs which are about what is not present (though with a further layer of complication in relation to Demand, since what he photographs are carefully constructed trompe l'oeil paper models of reality)

In the room Identity Politics, we looked and at and thought about a range of works, many of which had overt political meanings that we were clearly meant to discern. Others were more open to multiple interpretations. (Frustratingly the Tate Modern website doesn't list any information about the works it is unable to illustrate for copyright reasons, so I can't link to anything useful from that site).

Playing with Meaning (session 2) Notes - Tate Modern Course

These notes are from the second session of the course Playing with Meaning, Tate Modern, (by ticket only, sold out).

We continued discussing questions about the meaning of art works, beginning by looking at some of Arthur C. Danto's ideas. Danto, who died, last week, was famous for his 1964 paper 'The Artworld' in which he suggested that 

    'To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry - an atmopshere of artistic theory, a     knowledge of the history of art: an artworld' 

He fleshed this out in his extensive discussions of Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes and their significance, and by using a range of thought experiments which demonstrated the non-identity of indiscernibles: most famously in his discussion of 9 apparently identical square canvases painted red - each with different artistic properties, and some not even works of art (e.g. entitled 'Red Square', 'The Israelites Crossing the Red Sea' 'Kierkegaards Mood', and a canvas primed by the artist Giorgione - this last one not a work of art). 

An important feature of Danto's account of art was his emphasis that works of art are about something, they have a subject, and a viewpoint on that subject, a viewpoint that they characteristically express in an elliptical way that gives rise to interpretation.

You can read more about Danto, who was unusual amongst philosophers of art in that he wrote with great style and was also a serious art critic, in these obituaries: New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera  and in his own excellent 'Letter to Posterity'. There's also an audio interview with Danto on Art here (with transcript).

For a fascinating broader discussion of how meaning is communicated, listen to this podcast interview: Stephen Neale on Meaning and Interpretation

Moving to the topic of Play, we discussed both Bernard Suits' ideas about game-playing, what it is and why it is valuable, as argued in his negelected classic The Grasshopper. For more information about this book, read this review, and this interview with Tom Hurka on Suits on Games

We also considered Freud's essay 'The Creative Writer and Daydreaming' in which he suggested that the opposite of play for a child is not seriousness, but reality; that children are not usually confused about the difference between play and reality, but immerse themselves in play with a seriousness that adults would for the most part feel embarrassed to admit if they did it. The worlds that some creative writers create are analogous to the make believe games of children, and get their power from the wish fulfilment of childhood, and the unconscious forces at play then. Adults disguise the real source of power with the surface delight of aesthetic design. But, Freud suggests, it is the powerful emotional world of the child that fuels both the creator and the reader in their engagement with imaginary worlds.  Maria Popova has some extracts and comments on Freud's essay here.

In the Tate Modern gallery we explored some of Paul Klee's playful paintings in the new exhibition Making Visible, some of which are sophisticated doodles in which he takes a line for a walk, others play with abstraction, or experiment playfully with colour. We thought about them both in terms of play and playfulness (his interest in making them, ours in looking at them), and recognizing the range of aesthetic surface pleasures that he used to draw us into the works. In some cases, he deliberately set himself rules, as if playing a game, converting, for example shapes into abstractions in a series of tonally changing moves in his picture of pottery. 

We also discussed how the absence of contextual information about particular images in the exhibition made interpretation in terms of artist's intentions very difficult. Knowing whether a work was, for example, the result of a Bauhaus technical exercise, a caricature of a particular person, or a response to a particular situation, would have helped eliminate anachronistic and inappropriate responses. 

 



Playing with Meaning - notes and links from the Tate Modern Course

These notes are from the course Playing with Meaning, Tate Modern, (by ticket only, sold out).

Session 1 The artist's intentions and other contributions to meaning

What does a work of art mean? Possibly nothing at all. Possibly many different things. We all engage in projective interpretation (finding our own meanings in someone else's art) to some extent. But often artists want you to recognize features of their style, content, etc. So does that mean that the artists have the last say on what their work means? The debate is polarised between those who say No (labelled 'anti-intentionalists here) and those who say Yes (Intentionalists). Some philosophers have also suggested that what matters is not actual intentions, but virtual intentions, those which, based on the work and context, might plausibly be attributed to the artist...

Anti-Intentionalists see the principal appropriate activity of an art critic/viewer as scrutiny. That is, the viewer looks to see what is there, is not unduly influenced by art historical detail, facts about the artist's life, the subject matter, and so on.  Clive Bell's views in his book Art (1914) are an extreme example. 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. 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. 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.

A third position, taken by Jerry Fodor, amongst others,  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. 

There is a further issue of whether this sort of 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 always 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.

On the general question of how we discern the meaning of various communications, this audio podcast interview with the philosopher Stephen Neale on Meaning and Intention might be of interest.