art and allusion

Notes from Session 3 of Tate Modern Course: Sensing Art

This week in the Tate Modern course Sensing Art we examined questions of taste. There are two basic senses of taste: the taste of something (e.g. does it taste of strawberries), and the discrimination bewtween better and worse examples of something (as when we make a judgement of taste, that e.g. Picasso is a superior painter to Braque).

Discrimination of flavours isn't merely subjective. Some people are better at recognising objective qualities in the things they taste. Analogously, there are better and worse discriminators of the subtleties of what is in a work of art.

Are judgements of taste completely different from such judgements? Are they completely subjective, or are some art critics better at making judgements than others? In the 18th Century David Hume used the anecdote from Don Quixote of two wine tasters one detecting a metallic taste, the other a leathery taste, being vindicated when a key on a leather thong was found at the bottom of the barrel. We would like to have such an objective confirmation of our apparently subjective value judgements about art... See David Hume's  'Of The Standard of Taste' (the link here is to the full text with useful annotations and commentaries).

First, a good critic needs what Hume called 'delicacy of taste'. This is what the wine tasters in the example above demonstrated.

Secondly, a good critic needs practice. The skill of making judgment about works of art is one that benefits from repeated use.

Thirdly, a good critic needs to be free from bias. Not easy to achieve, but that's the ideal goal.

And lastly, a good critic needs to have a sound understanding of whatever he or she is assessing. So if looking at a landscape painting, the good critic will be aware of other great landscape paintings, of work by the artist's contemporaries, and so on. This would allow a critic to judge that a work was derivative or heavily influenced by someone else. It would also, incidentally, allow the critic to recognise qualities such as originality or allusion.

In contrast with Hume, Clive Bell, writing just before the First World War, in his book Art (good title!) argued that to judge the aesthetic quality of a work of art requires no special background knowledge. What is needed is sensitivity to what he called Significant Form (patterns of lines, shapes and colours capable of evoking the aesthetic emotion in the viewer). For Bell art history is interesting, but not a pre-requisite of engaging with artworks seriously...(more on Bell's theory of art in chapter one of my book The Art Question).

There is also the possibility that much (or all) of what we call taste in art is a self-fulfilling prophecy of the rich and  powerful who determine which works are 'in' and which 'out.' They come to a consensus about which artists merit attention, but this consensus may not be based on any objective quality of the work (it might simply be a matter of 'investment potential'): if they'd focussed their hype on a different artist, the same effect might have been achieved in terms of reputation...This is the cynical view...but if you read the interviews in the recent Collecting Contemporary ed. Adam Lindeman you will find some support for this.

If you are interested in doing some further reading on philosophical questions about  'Taste and 'Taste'', Carolyn Korsmeyer's essay on Taste in the Routledge Companion to Aesthetics is a very  good place to start.

 

 

Sensing Art - Tate Modern - Session 2 - How What We Know Affects What We See

How Theory-Laden is Our Seeing?

Notes from Session Two of  Sensing Art a Tate Modern course led by Nigel Warburton (by ticket only).

For the second session we focused on seeing and the degree to which our knowledge affects what we see. Here is the philosophical background.

Some philosophers of art in a tradition stemming from Immanuel Kant have argued that we should strive to remove all pre-conceptions and expectations when coming to a work of art. With visual art, our seeing should be pure and unpolluted by what Ernst Gombrich calls our 'mental set' and others our 'cognitive stock', that is the beliefs that influence how (and perhaps what) we see. For Arthur Schopenhauer, this amounted to losing one's sense of individuality and becoming a 'clear mirror' to the work.  A similar idea resurfaced in the Twentieth Century with Clive Bell's theory of art as significant form.  He stressed that when viewing a painting as art we need bring nothing with us from life, no art historical knowledge, and needn't even concern ourselves with what is represented in the picture, but should experience its patterns of line, shape and colour as stimuli to an aesthetic emotion (for more on Clive Bell's theory of art, see these notes from a previous Tate Modern course, or Chapter 1 of my book The Art Question ). 

Nelson Goodman (in his book Languages of Art) mocked the assumption that we can achieve such a purity of vision and the idea that the resulting frissons are particularly valuable as indicators of aesthetic worth by labelling it a 'Tingle-Immersion' theory (even including a mock footnote referring to Immanuel Immersion and Joseph Tingle ca 1800).

So there are two issues here. First can we practically achieve a purity of response, a kind of retinal seeing unaffected by beliefs? Secondly, even if we could, should it be given a higher value than are everyday seeing which is so obviously coloured by mental set?

In the philosophy of science the idea of neutral observation is frequently called into question. N.R. Hanson famously declared 'There's more to seeing than meets the eyeball' and 'seeing is a theory-laden activity.' For a summary of some of the key debates, see 'Theory and Observation in Science' in the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy (a very useful and generally reliable free online resource). We may be almost blind to unexpected phenomena - such as a four of hearts in black or a 6 of spades in red. Our conceptual expectations affect what we see and remember.

Yet there are some pheonomena which are completely resistant to being affected by expectations. The Müller-Lyer ilusion, for example is one of these. We know the lines are the same length, but that doesn't allow us to see them as the same length. The Checker Board Illusion is an even more powerful example: it y seems impossible that squares A and B are the same shade, yet they are. Knowing that they are doesn't allow us to perceive them as the same. This is a different case from the Duck-Rabbit which seems to some degree under our conscious control: we can see the figure as a duck or a rabbit (but not both), and make the according Gestalt shift consciously (we can even choose to see it as a sea-gull or a hare). For my views on the Duck-Rabbit and a purported Stone Age precedent, see 'World's Oldest Optical Illusion Found?'

In the Tate Modern collection we visited two rooms in the 'Poetry and Dream' section (Level 3 West): the one dedicated to Mona Hatoum's work (read or listen to a fascinating long interview with Mona Hatoum); and the one containing the recently loaned Picasso painting 'Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust' (famous for having fetched the highest price of any painting at auction, c£66 million).

In the case of Mona Hatoum, we considered how knowledge that she is a Palestinian woman who has lived in a number of countries affects how we perceive her work. Captions and discussions of her work frequently emphasize her nationality and the fact that she spent her childhood in Beirut. Once you know this fact, it is difficult (perhaps impossible) to see her work without this colouring the interpretation. Yet in the interview linked above she is very concerned (at least in relation to her early work) that people should have a sensual, bodily experience of her work as well as an intellectual one:

'the work that I wanted to make I wanted it to appeal to your senses first maybe or to somehow affect you in a bodily way and then the sort of connotations and concepts that are behind that work can come out of that original physical experience. This is what I was aiming at in the work. I wanted it to be experienced through the body. In other words I want work to be both experienced sensually and intellectually rather than just one dimensionally if you like.' (from an interview with John Tusa) 

 With the Picasso painting, knowledge both that it is an extremely valuable object, but also that it depicts a woman with whom Picasso was sexually obsessed (and who was seventeen when he met her) are hard to set aside...

In discussion several people raised questions about the curator's role in shaping what we see (notes and links from a previous course discussion of this topic are relevant), and more generally about the relevance of an artist's intentions in determining what we see (more notes and links relevant to this topic). In the interview with Mona Hatoum above, it is interesting in this context that she expressly discusses multiple interpretations of the work that transfigures domestic utensils: 

'...it becomes a sort of threat as opposed to comfort and then makes you think about all the possible unpleasant things to do with home whether it's like the housewife or the woman feeling entrapped by domesticity, or whether it's to do with a condemned environment where the inhabitants have to flee, or an environment that is to do with incarceration as in being under house arrest, or the notion of the home denied. I mean there could be so many different readings, but basically what I like to do with these works is to like introduce a kind of disruptive element, physical or psychological element, that makes you question the whole environment.' (from the interview with John Tusa)

Listen or read the entire interview for the interesting comments she makes about multiple meanings and the richness of artworks:  'the language of art is slippery' 'the meanings are never fixed',  and the analogy she makes between a work of art and a mirror. (You might also look at a discussion from a previous course of questions about projective interpretation and alleged objective meanings of works of art).

 

Sensing Art - Tate Modern - Notes from Session One - Synaesthesia

Sorry for the delay with these notes...

These are from the Tate Modern course Sensing Art led by Nigel Warburton (by ticket only).

Aims of the course:

• To think about the senses in relation to art
•  To engage with works in the Tate Modern collection, and, hopefully, to discover new, rich, and interesting ways of experiencing them

The topic of the first session was Synaesthesia There are at least two important meanings of 'synaesthesia'. The first sense, often investigated by psychologists and neurologists, is an involuntary mixing of the senses. This involves the appearance of sensory information from a sense modality that isn't being directly stimulated. Put simply it is when someone sees the letter 'A' as red (the commonest form of synaesthesia), or has strong visual stimuli when listening to music, or auditory phenomena when looking at visual art.

The artist David Hockney, the composer Olivier Messiaen, and the writer Vladimir Nabokov, are examples of synaesthetes in this sense. Wassily Kandinsky is widely assumed to have had synaesthesia on the basis of his explicit aim to evoke auditory phenomena through his painting. You might want to read this interesting article about Kandinsky and some other synaesthete artists, see 'The Man Who Heard His Paintbox' and a composer's view of Kandinsky's 'visual chords' 'Sound and Vision'.

The UK Synaesthesia Association investigates this type of synaesthesia.

The second sense of 'synaesthesia', the one we focused on in the course, might be called 'artificial synaesthesia'. Those who don't have involuntary confusions of the senses in the style of full-blown synaesthetes may be able to stimulate synaesthesia-like experiences in relation to art. This is sometimes used as a creative technique by artists and writers. The idea is that by deliberately concentrating on an 'inappropriate' sense modality when experiencing a painting or sculpture, new aspects of the work might be revealed, and it can be experienced under a different aspect. 

In the Tate Modern galleries we spent most of the evening in Level 3 East Material Gestures. An example of the kind of activity we used to generate artificial synaesthesia. Looking at Philip Guston's 'The Return' from the point of view of the sense of taste led several people to see ice cream scoops in the picture. If you see the yellowish shape in the bottom right hand part of the picture as a scoop, it changes the way you organise your visual understanding of the painting, seeing it as having depth and solidity. In contrast, when someone compared the image to an English breakfast, the white surrounding this yellow shape, suggested the white of an egg, bringing that white part of the painting to our attention in a different way, and emphasizing the rasher-like striated red marks to the left of the 'egg'. With Clyfford Still's untitled painting (sadly not illustrated, but described here), someone imagined tasting the picture, and licking its surface, which immediately drew to our attention the complexity of marks on what had appeared an almost uniform blue canvas, and gave a different significance to the marks at the top of the painting which appeared as layers uncovered beneath the blue. In both these cases the transfer of senses was based on seeing abstract paintings as if representational of edible substances - quite different I suspect from the actual synaesthete's experience.

With Cy Twombly's late series, asked to think of these through the modality of hearing, the rhythmic, large scale, angry red marks invoked rock music, and for some, Stockhausen or Debussy's L'Après-Midi d'Un Faun. This fits very well with the paintings' titles which suggest Bacchanalian festivals (and the loss of sense of self that Friedrich Nietzsche indentified in his account of the Dionysian force in art in his first book The Birth of Tragedy - for an introduction to this, listen to my interview with Aaron Ridley on Nietzsche on art).

The idea that we might experience paintings through more than one sense modality is not new. 

The art historian and connoisseur Bernard Berenson writing about Giotto in his book Italian Painters of the Renaissance,  set out his view about tactile values. For him effective figure painting needed 'the illusion of being able to touch the figure'. He wrote:

'I must have the illusion of varying muscular sensations inside my palm and fingers corresponding to the various projections of this figure, before I shall take it for granted as real, and let it affect me lastingly.'

The critic Roger Fry in his 'Essay on Aesthetics' of 1909 suggested that the emotional effects of painting are felt, that rhythm in visual art  'appeals to all the sensations which accompany muscular activity'. Similarly mass, and space depicted in visual art appeal to kinetic and tactile qualities. 

You might also be interested in notes on the topic of 'Molyneux's Problem' from a previous course at Tate Modern available here.