art and allusion

Notes on Session 4 of Philosophy-Art-Society (Tate Modern)

These notes complement the 4-session Tate Modern course Philosophy - Art - Society led by Nigel Warburton (ticket only, fully booked).

For the final session of the course we considered the idea of Aestheticism.

The word 'Aesthetics' is used in a number of ways. It has come to be a synonym for the Philosophy of Art. Historically it has been more specific in scope, and was the study of beauty in art and nature experienced through the senses. 

'Aestheticism' is the focus on personal experience of a sensual kind. Historically it is associated with the 19th Century movement in the arts that put beauty above social concerns - 'Art for art's sake' was its slogan  (Théophile Gautier may have coined this phrase). The idea was that art needed no justification beyond itself and the aesthetic pleasures it gives rise to.

In Kierkegaard's Either/Or, the author of the section 'Either' exemplifies the life of an aesthete, who sets morals aside, and concentrates on his own sensual pleasures, whether from music, or from seduction. His biggest fear is boredom (and he devises Crop Rotation as a solution!)

Listen to a podcast summarising Kierkegaard's Either/Or (from my book Philosophy: The Classics)

If you're interested in Kierkegaard you might like this BBC Radio 3 programme 'Fear and Trembling in Copenhagen' (though note that I mispronounce 'Regina Olsen' throughout!)

Walter Pater in the Conclusion of his book The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873) stressed the need to 'burn always with this hard,  gemlike flame' so that we would not miss the moments of beauty that give life significance. Read Walter Pater's Conclusion (omitted from a later edition of the book because, in Pater's words 'I conceived it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall.') Pater seems to be advocating a hedonistic pleasure in the moment, a cultivation of perception to enjoy the beauty and emotions stirred by life and art. This aestheticism inspired Oscar Wilde, who loved the book. It stood in stark contrast to the view of many Victorians that art should get its value from its utility and its moral stance.

Clive Bell's book Art (1914) set forward a different kind of aestheticism with his notion of Significant Form (the quality that all genuine works of visual art allegedly shared), i.e. patterns of lines, shapes, and colours, capable of stirring the Aesthetic Emotion in a sensitive viewer. This is aestheticism in the sense that all that matters is the personal response of the sensitive viewer - art history, utility, artistry, social context are all irrelevant to experiencing art as art:

'The representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful, but it is always irrelevant. For to appreciate a work of art, we must bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its affairs and ideas, no familiarity with its emotions.'

Read the relevant extract from Clive Bell's book Art. For a critical examination of Clive Bell's views, see my book The Art Question (Routledge).

In the gallery at Tate Modern we went into the Alexander Calder Performing Sculpture exhibition, and attempted to burn with gemlike flames, making ourselves receptive to the three dimensional patterns of his mobiles 

Read a review of the Calder exhibition (Adrian Searle in The Guardian).

Thanks to everyone who came to the course. It was great meeting you all. I hope you enjoyed it. For information about future courses, keep an eye on this weblog or sign up for email updates, or follow me on Twitter at @philosophybites I won't be teaching another course at Tate Modern until early next year (2017).  

 

 

 

Notes on Session 3 of Philosophy-Art-Society (Tate Modern)

These notes complement the 4-session Tate Modern course Philosophy - Art - Society led by Nigel Warburton (ticket only, fully booked).For this week’s class we looked at the idea of the self as a social construct, both in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and in that of Erving Goffman (who was heavily influenced by Sartre.

Sartre’s descriptions of Bad Faith (a particular kind of self-deception about the limits of one’s personal freedom) include the example of the Café Waiter who enacts his role, performs his dance, as if he could not be anything else. For Sartre he is in denial of the degree to which he is not bound by social norms or by any picture other people have of what he ought to be. We also discussed Sartre’s argument against solipsism (the idea that you might be the sole mind in the universe) – the example of a voyeur peering through a keyhole who suddenly becomes aware of himself as a ‘looked at look’ when he hears footsteps behind him. The implication is that we are all pre-consciously aware of ourselves as being one mind amongst many, and that social emotions such as shame reveal how much our way of being in the world takes this for granted.

Listen to a Philosophy Bites podcast on Sartre on Bad Faith

Erving Goffman, in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, put forward an interesting dramaturgical line on human interactions. Taking seriously Shakespeare’s line that ‘All the world’s a stage…’ he analysed a wide range of interactions in terms of masks, stage-setting, and performance. Surprisingly he did not think that there was a ‘true’ self behind all the masks.

Listen to a Social Science Bites podcast on Erving Goffman (with transcript)

Read more about Erving Goffman (Wikipedia)

In the gallery we looked at selected works in the Performing for the Camera exhibition, considering them from the perspective of Goffman’s dramaturgical framework. The setting, the appearance given and given off, etc.

For the final week of the course we’ll be looking at Aestheticism…

Notes and links from 'The Image and the Body in Life and Death' (3 and 4)

Notes from Session 3 of The Image and the Body in Life and Death (Tate Modern, ticket holders only).

We focused on Susan Sontag's scepticism about documentary photography in her book On Photography, and in particular the idea that photographs can't communicate what she calls moral knowledge. (If you have access via a library to Oxford journals you can read an article I wrote on this topic 'Photographic Communication' British Journal of Aesthetics, 1988 here).

In the Conflict, Time, Photography exhibition we tested her ideas against a range of works, all of which involved a moral stance on events in war.

Notes from Session 4

The theme of this week's session was realisms in pictorial representation.

The word 'realism' is used in many different ways. Sometimes it refers to a specific movement in art, particularly the nineteenth century movement exemplified by Gustave Courbet (described, for example in Lina Nochlin's book Realism); at other times it is used to describe images which are especially convincing as depcitions of real places or things (even when those things aren't real) - in other words, it can used to refer to a general style (or group of styles) of depiction.

Some features shared by many so-called 'realistic' styles of depiction in painting include

• Inclusion of incidental (and apparently unchosen detail)
• Apparent verisimilitude (even to the point of trompe l'oeil - there are some great examples of trompe l'oeil painting here - most of which work partly because of viewer expectations)
• Fine detail
• Imitiation of photographic cropping etc. 

Photography is often taken as a touchstone of realism. Yet a number of writers have argued that photographic realism gets its force from more than its attention to detail and inclusion of the incidental. Photographic realism is often thought of as the product of automatism, which is alleged to make it more objective (the lack of complex intentional control over the picture-making process - in the sense that photography is subtractive where painting additive) combined with the distinctive optico-chemical (or, these days, optico-digital) causal link back to subject matter, the fact that photographs aren't just pictures, but are simultaneously traces, and as such can yield special kinds of evidence if enough about the circumstances in which the images were taken is known (we can decide a 1oo metre sprint using a photofinish - no painter, however quick with the brush, could purport to give such objective evidence about who crossed the line first). Even if a photograph is blurred an indistinct, it is more 'realistic' than a painting because it is (in C.S. Peirce's terms) an indexical sign, as well as an iconic one, for its subject matter. (For more on C.S. Peirce's division of signs into Index, Icon, and Symbol, see these notes). A death mask or hand print might achieve this sort of direct link with reality, but most paintings cannot.

Some writers have gone even further. The contemporary analytic philosopher Kendall Walton (his webpage has some downloadable pdfs) has even gone so far as to claim - counterintuitively - that we can quite literally see through photographs - they are transparent. We see through glass, or via mirror reflections, and would see if we looked at miniature cameras as a kind of prosthetic eye, why then not say that we see via the direct causal chain that links a photograph with its object. I look at a photograph of my now dead grandfather, on this view, and quite literally see him. Photographs allow us, on Walton's view, to see into the past. And that is what gives them their distinctive quality as a type of picture. (There are plenty of philsoophers who disagree with this view...).

Listen to a Philosophy Bites podcast interview with Kendall Walton on Photography

We also thought about the nature of a mental image in contrast with direct perception. Sartre's thoughts about the experience of looking at a picture and the way we are taken beyond what is given are relevant. 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.

In the gallery in Tate Modern we spent time scrutinising the paintings in Realisms (Level 2 West), thinking about the various rhetorical and technical ways in which a sense of realism was communicated. 

If you are interested in the notion of imagination (in the sense of forming mental images, and their relation to the world), I recommend Colin McGinn's excellent book Mindsight.

Notes and Links from 'The Image and Body in Life and Death' (2)

For this second session of The Image and Body  in Life and Death we focused on photography and particularly on the photographs within the Tate Modern exhibition Conflict, Time, Photography.

I identified 4 relevant themes

Traces/Pictures

Absence

Synecdoche

Implicature

 

Traces/Pictures

Documentary photographs are both traces of what they are of and also picture some of their causes. The optico-chemical process, or more recently, the optico-electronic process leads to changes which are in some sense a trace of the causal process, just as a footprint in the flowerbed, no matter how legible it is, is a trace of an intruder. Photographs are traces of what they are of, and this makes them a special kind of evidence, potentially, different in kind from most other forms of pictures (though some like hand prints on a paleolithic cave wall combine trace and pictorial elements).

Photographs are also pictures. In documentary photography there is an understanding that we are not being deliberately mislead about key factors of the relationship between a photograph as a trace and a photograph as a picture. In the terms used by the philosopher C.S. Peirce, photographs are indexical signs (because they are traces) and also iconic signs (because they picture things). In pictorial photography (as for example in a ‘photograph of’ an angel, or one of Jeff Wall’s  composite images), the causal process by which the image was made does not determine the subject matter – we are interested in what the image looks to be of rather than how it was actually made (such photographs often play on the tacit presumed veracity of documentary photography, often with some irony).

Some analytic philosophers have argued that the causal relationship between what a photograph is of and the finished image allows us quite literally to see through photographs into the past. Kendall Walton thinks this. Listen to an interview with Kendall Walton on Photography. I think this goes too far.

In the Time, Conflict, Photography exhibition, as well as combining trace and image, some of the images are actually and self-consciously of traces left by people and by armaments – traces of traces as it werel.

 

Absence

The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, in his book Being and Nothingness (and also in his fascinating The Imaginary), discussed absence. Sartre was trying to give a phenomenological account of consciousness, one that focuses on what it is like and gives a rich description that somehow captures the essence of phenomena. He imagines going to meet his friend Pierre at a café, but Pierre is not there. Wherever he looks, Pierre isn’t. The lack or absence that he experiences is part of his experience of the café. It is true that there is no rhinoceros in the café, but he doesn’t experience that as a lack of a rhinoceros. Pierre’s absence, in contrast, ‘haunts’ the café. This isn’t something that features in his retinal image. But our experience of the world is not like watching flickering images on the back of our own eyeballs. It involves a richer sense not only of what is before us, but also what is not before us, which we experience as absence.

This notion of absence is particularly relevant to interpreting images in the exhibition because throughout there is an absence of people, an absence of the very events we presume to have caused the traces that have been photographed. In most cases experiencing the photographs appropriately involves going beyond the visually given in this way.

Listen to a short talk about Absence and Presence in the work of the photographer Thomas Demand

Synecdoche 

‘Synecdoche’ is a literary term. It involves taking a part for the whole. So, for example, when someone refers to ‘head of cattle’ they don’t just mean the heads – it’s a way of referring to the whole beast. When someone says ‘There’s more to seeing than meets the eye’ they don’t just mean one eye. Visual synecdoche is the act of presenting a part but as a way of referring to a larger whole. We discussed this in relation to Don McCullin’s famous photograph of a shell-shocked solider (taken in Vietnam in 1968). Don McCullin talks about how he came to take the photograph in the audio here (he apparently never blinked in all the time McCullin photographed him - 5 frames). McCullin describes it as 'a silent protest about the futility of war'.  Although the photograph itself is literally only of, say, 1/100 second, it refers to much more than this. It is a visual synecdoche, for amongst other things, the wider experience of US soldiers in Vietnam, horror in battle, and so on. In a sense through presenting this one split second of one person’s life, McCullin has given us the equivalent of the Unknown Soldier, a solider who is buried to stand in for all the other unknown soldiers. Photographs in their causal relationship to what they are of have something akin to a literal meaning. Synechdoche is one way that they go beyond the straightforward ‘of-ness’ and become pictures with wider significance.

 

 Implicature

Implicature is a notion introduced by the philosopher H.P. Grice. Implication is what follows logically.

 

All women are mortal

Simone de Beauvoir is a woman

Therefore Simone de Beauvoir is mortal

In the above syllogism, the conclusion follows logically from the premises (i.e. if the premises are true, the conclusion must be true). In other words, the premises imply the conclusion.

In ordinary conversation much of our understanding comes from implicature not implication. So, for example, if I say

‘She got married and had children’, this sentence doesn’t actually tell you the order in which these events occurred – she could have had the children first. Conventions about how we use English, however, lead most people to understand this as meaning she had children after getting married.

‘Are you coming for the drinks in the Members Room provided on this course?’ and you reply ‘I have to get up early tomorrow.’ you haven’t said that you aren’t coming for the drink, but that is what most listeners would understand as your meaning. This is another example of implicature, and comes from a range of conventions, expectations, and shared understandings.

Photographs (and other pictures) have implicatures – meanings which we can reasonably glean from them set up by contexts and expectations. In the Time, Conflict, Photography exhibition, the meanings of some of the images require specific information about the events associated with a particular place photographed some specified time after the events have taken place.

In the exhibition we concentrated on relatively few images, including Simon Norfolk’s Afghanistan series from Chrontopia (read Julian Stallabrass's essay on Norfolk's Chronotopia here), photograms of weeds from Hiroshima, and the images from the series Shot at Dawn in the final room of the exhibition taken by Chloe Dewe Mathews at the sights where 99 years earlier  First World War deserters had been shot at dawn. Watch a video of Chloe Dewe Mathews discussing this work (with transcript).

 Next week we will be returning to this exhibition, considering the claim that Susan Sontag made in On Photography that photographs can’t take a moral stance because they are 

Notes and Links from 'The Image and Body in Life and Death'

These are notes and links from the Tate Modern course 'The Image and Body in Life and Death' led by Nigel Warburton (ticket holders only). 

We began by considering shame. This is a social emotion. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre went so far as to claim that its existence refuted solipsism (the idea that I am the only conscious mind in the universe). In his famous example from his book Being and Nothingness he describes a voyeur looking through a keyhole, completely absorbed in what he can see, only pre-reflectively aware of himself as a conscious being. Then he hears footsteps in the corridor behind him. He feels shame, the disapproving look of the other, and becomes reflectively aware of himself as a 'looked at look' (possibly in this he is also in Bad Faith, a particular kind of self-deception that involves denying your own freedom since he accepts the Other's view of how he should be, and realises he has fallen short of that expectation). 

Many religions have encouraged a degree of shame about exposing the body. In the Genesis story of Adam and Eve, Eve feels shame at her nakedness once she's eaten from the tree of knowledge. In Masaccio's famous image she tries to cover her nakedness. The art critic John Berger discussed shame in depictions of Adam and Eve, and also the conventions in Western of art of the nude in Ways of Seeing - originally a 4-part TV series from 1972, but now usually encountered in book form.

You can watch Ways of Seeing, the classic TV series, on YouTube here . The discussion of shame, and the convention of painting the nude occurs in episode 2  - he's good on the spectator's role in relation to depicted nudity (in Berger's view, the convention of nude painting was largely about displaying women as sexual objects for male viewers in contrast with nakedness, such as in the Rubens portrait of Hélène Fourment where although partly undressed, she is depicted as an autonomous individual rather than as a passive object. Berger thought there were only about 20 such pictures in the Western oil painting tradition). 

In the galleries we looked at a range of works in Poetry and Dream (level 2 West):

Close Up: Identity and the Photographic Portrait 

Russian Revolutionary Posters

The Reclining Nude

We focused on questions about awareness of being photographed or depicted and where the pose and treatment of the depictions of bodies stood on a spectrum from shame, embarrassment, indifference, ignorance,  pride. 

The Russian posters were distinctively different from the other pictures in that they had a meaning fixed by their propaganda purpose (even where that was hard to read because of lack of contextual information), and the images of women were specifically targeted at women viewers (the woman viewer was supposed to identify with the woman in the picture and change her behaviour accordingly); in contrast other pictures were open to a wider range of interpretations.

With the reclining nudes there was a strong sense that the intended viewers of some, such as the Balthus picture Nude on a Chaise Longue were heterosexual men, the subjects eyes were closed and although aware of being seen, where themselves recipients of a voyeuristic (bordeline padedophile? )male gaze. The odalisque pose was used almost as a shorthand symbol or tag in Picasso's Nude, Green Leaves and Bust in contrast with his late Nude Woman With Necklace where idealisation and passivity are replaced with direct confrontation with the viewer, possibly tinged with misogyny in the depiction - despite the high degree of abstractions of the image. There is also a corresponding aggression in the way that Picasso has applied the paint.

The photographic works by Lisette Model raised questions about performance of the self and how the awareness of being seen changes the subject. The photographs by Errazuriz, in contrast, were all collaborations with the subjects: in some a transvestite plays a role, but others seem more directly revalatory of character (closer to the clothed equivalent of John Berger's 'naked' images, rather than the dramatised presentation of a nude).

Next week we will look much more closely at the nature of photographic representation and how its documentary aspect distinguishes it from most painting, together with the issue of whether a photograph can be of something which is not actually happening in front of the lens when the shutter falls. Questions of propaganda and use of images raised by the posters will also be relevant to the interpretation of images in Conflict, Time, Photography.

Notes and Links from Session 6 of '6 Ways of Thinking About Art' Tate Modern

Art as Curated

For the final session of this course we looked at the Louis Bourgeois: Works on Paper exhibition at Tate Modern. 

Bourgeois's art transforms autobiography, and particularly childhood trauma and tension. It is replete with symbolic representations that hark back to the betrayal she felt at her father's long term affair with her English tutor. There is an excellent introduction to Louise Bourgeois' major work  featuring Frances Morris (and Louise Bourgeois herself) here (much of this work was shown at the 2007 Tate Modern retrospective):

If you're interested in Louise Bourgeois, see also notes and many links from my 2007 Tate Modern course 'Transformations' 

We considered the curator's share looking for invitations to focus on 

Projective interpretation  

Formal aspects (including patterns of hanging, juxtapositions, pairings, framing etc)

Artistic Intentions (particularly in relation to captions e.g. re 'Birth' - an ambiguous picture, with an unambiguous caption, the decision not to say anything about 'Maman' the giant spider sculpture)

Material Qualities of the objects (e.g. the fabric book, the effect of displaying it in frames rather than as a book etc.)

What was depicted (the hands, the body).

Thanks for coming to the course, if you did. I really enjoyed discussing these topics with you. 

I'm hoping to be teaching a new 6-session course from 23rd February 2015. 

Other Philosophy courses I'll be teaching - at Conway Hall (near Holborn tube station) on Thursday evenings from 4th September 2014:

Philosophy: the Basics

Machiavelli to Mill (an introduction to Political Philosophy)

 

Notes on Session 5 of '6 Ways of Thinking About Art' Tate Modern

Art as Realistic

This week we talked about pictorial realism in both painting and photography. 

The word 'realism' is used in many different ways. Sometimes it refers to a specific movement in art, particularly the nineteenth century movement exemplified by Gustave Courbet (described, for example in Lina Nochlin's book Realism); at other times it is used to describe images which are especially convincing as depcitions of real places or things (even when those things aren't real) - in other words, it can used to refer to a general style (or group of styles) of depiction.

Some features shared by many so-called 'realistic' styles of depiction in painting include

• Inclusion of incidental (and apparently unchosen detail)
• Apparent verisimilitude (even to the point of trompe l'oeil - there are some great examples of trompe l'oeil painting here - most of which work partly because of viewer expectations)
• Fine detail
• Imitiation of photographic cropping etc. 

Photography is often taken as a touchstone of realism. Yet a number of writers have argued that photographic realism gets its force from more than its attention to detail and inclusion of the incidental. Photographic realism is often thought of as the product of automatism, which is alleged to make it more objective (the lack of complex intentional control over the picture-making process - in the sense that photography is subtractive where painting additive) combined with the distinctive optico-chemical (or, these days, optico-digital) causal link back to subject matter, the fact that photographs aren't just pictures, but are simultaneously traces, and as such can yield special kinds of evidence if enough about the circumstances in which the images were taken is known (we can decide a 1oo metre sprint using a photofinish - no painter, however quick with the brush, could purport to give such objective evidence about who crossed the line first). Even if a photograph is blurred an indistinct, it is more 'realistic' than a painting because it is (in C.S. Peirce's terms) an indexical sign, as well as an iconic one, for its subject matter. (For more on C.S. Peirce's division of signs into Index, Icon, and Symbol, see these notes). A death mask or hand print might achieve this sort of direct link with reality, but most paintings cannot.

Some writers have gone even further. The contemporary analytic philosopher Kendall Walton (his webpage has some downloadable pdfs) has even gone so far as to claim - counterintuitively - that we can quite literally see through photographs - they are transparent. We see through glass, or via mirror reflections, and would see if we looked at miniature cameras as a kind of prosthetic eye, why then not say that we see via the direct causal chain that links a photograph with its object. I look at a photograph of my now dead grandfather, on this view, and quite literally see him. Photographs allow us, on Walton's view, to see into the past. And that is what gives them their distinctive quality as a type of picture. (There are plenty of philsoophers who disagree with this view...).

Listen to a Philosophy Bites podcast interview with Kendall Walton on Photography

The relation of a photograph to the reality it apparently depicts may be less than obvious. We considered a range of cases including the photograph 'Corridor' by Thomas Demand. Listen to an  18 minute podcast discussion of Demand's work from a Tate Modern symposium on photography 'Agency and Automation' where I address the question of whether you make a photograph of an absence.

Another, photograph we discussed, was 'Top Withens' by Bill Brandt, an image that turns out to have been made from several negatives, a technique that David Hockney attacked as 'Stalinism'. My essay 'Brandt's Pictorialism' includes a discussion of this image and Hockney's criticism of Brandt's manipulation.

In the gallery we looked at Robert Mapplethorpe's Self Portraits, and in particular the ways in which photography revealed his playful manipulation of roles. Since Hippolyte Bayard's self-portrait as a drowned man (1840), photographers have exploited the medium's capacity to reveal role playing and something of the actor acting the roles when it comes to self portraiture. In Mapplethorpe's case, the staged self images are significantly different from most of his portraits of others - there he seems to be attempting to reveal something of the character of the sitter. We also discussed Erving Goffman's notion of the presentation of self, and his dramaturgical analysis of human interaction. 

Notes and Links from Session 4 of '6 Ways of Thinking About Art'

Art as Material

Many works of art are physical objects. Their materiality affects us. In this week's session of the '6 Ways of Thinking About Art' course at Tate Modern we focussed on some of the psychological associations of particular objects, their textures, and their scale. 

Two theorists of sensed space, the architect Ernö Goldfinger and the philosopher Gaston Bachelard have made interesting observations about how rooms, the textures of materials, the sounds, smells, shapes, and evocative objects contribute to our experience of real, imagined and remembers spaces.

Goldfinger on The Sensation of Space
In a series of three articles published between 1941 and 1942, Ernö Goldfinger gave his account of our experience of enclosed space - a sense that begins in the womb.  For him architecture is not a sculptural practice, but rather an art of enclosing. Architecture has to be experienced to be understood. The skilful architect can enclose space in such a way as to evoke a particular kind of emotion in the person experiencing it from within. Goldfinger's account is in some ways a gloss on his mentor, Auguste Perret's comment:

Architecture masters space, limits it, encloses it, circles it. It has this prerogative to create magical places totally the work of the intellect.

For Goldfinger our sensation of space is largely pre-conscious (i.e. we can bring ourselves to be aware of it). Like music it can affect us without our being aware of its details, or how it achieves its effects. Many different features contribute to our experience of space:

‘Memories and experience, not only of visual sensation but also of sound and touch and smell enter into it. The sound and vibration in a hall; the physical touch of the walls of a narrow passage; the atmosphere and temperature of a stuffy room; the smell of a damp cellar; all are, in various degrees, components of spatial sensation. Every element, plastic or pictorial, partially obstructing the view, and people in the crowd rubbing against you, are part of it’ Goldfinger ‘The  Sensation of Space’

So for Goldfinger the skill of the architect lies in his or her ability to enclose space in various ways in order to evoke emotions.

Bachelard on the Poetics of Space
For Gaston Bachelard, in Chapter One of his quirky and jumbled The Poetics of Space, the early experience of a house, a bedroom, is rich and important. Our first house  becomes a source of emotionally charged symbolic imagery that we revisit in dreams and daydreams and carry into every experience. Inhabited space is the non-I that protects the I (in contrast with the usual formulation where the child distinguishes itself - the I - from a more impersonal non-I - the external world).

    ‘We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection’

As he puts it:

‘Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.’

Bachelard is surely right about how our early experiences of space and of objects permeate our present experience.

In the galleries we explored how in a range of work in the Arte Povera displays the physical substance of the materials affected us and frequently encouraged us to become childlike in our relation to the pieces. (Some of Freud's comments about the creative writer and play are also relevant here - see for example these extracts on the Brainpicker site). We ended by looking at Richard Serra's Trip Hammer, thinking about how the phsyical material (rusting steel), it's sense of weight, its industrial associations, it's harshness, and its scale (taking us back to the sense of being a child under a table perhaps), all contributed to our experience of it, as well as the obvious sense of danger from the apparent (or actual?) precariousness of the balance - it also combines the childlike desire to balance objects with, at some level, perhaps, the desire to know them down. You can watch Moby talking about this piece from 2.25 in this video:

Notes and Links from Session 3 of '6 Ways of Thinking About Art'

This week we looked at the question of how relevant an artist's intentions might be to interpreting a work of art.  I was not attempting to give a conclusive argument in favour of one or other stance, but rather to map out alternatives informed by philosophical aesthetics. 

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.

I presented Clive Bell's views in his book Art (1914) as 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, which we didn't discuss has been taken by Jerry Fodor in his article 'It's Deja Vu All Over Again' (a quotation from the accidentally  brilliantYogi 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.

 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 gallery we applied some of these ideas to Mark Rothko's Seagram Murals. There's an excellent article about these paintings by Jonathan Jones here. We began by thinking about whether it is possible to see these well-known paintings with fresh eyes - the sort of approach that Bell would encourage. I provided two sorts of contextual information and we discussed the works in relation to these: a) the much-quoted line from Rothko about intending to make diners in the swanky restaurant they were originally commissioned for lose their appetites and feel claustrophobic as if with walled up windows, and b) the idea that Rothko was influenced by Nietzsche's 'The Birth of Tragedy' (and Kierkegaard's 'Fear and Trembling') and was attempting to make Dionysian art. You can listen to a talk I gave at a 2009 Tate Modern Rothko symposium on the topic of Nietzsche's influence here (I'm speaking from 1 hour 12 mins, 05 secs in - but it takes a while to start the audio on the streaming).

 

Notes and Links from Session 2 of '6 Ways of Thinking About Art' (Tate Modern)

Clive Bell's theory of Significant Form was the focus of this week's session of 6 Ways of Thinking About Art. Bell, whose polemic Art was published in 1914, was a passionate advocate of Post-Impression. His book is a polemic designed to demonstrate that Post Impressionist artists such as Cézanne and Matisse were artists in exactly the same way that Leonardo and Titian were, and that a cathedral and a carpet could be works of art in that sense too - for him there was no meaningful distinction between art and craft (and, indeed, he thought many objects traditionally described as works of craft merited the term art). 

For Bell it is obvious that art must have a common essence - something that makes all works of art art (this is a contentious assumption - many people have claimed that 'art' is what Ludwig Wittgenstein called a family resemblance term with no defining essence, but rather a pattern of overlapping similarities between the things we call art). Bell believed that if there were no common essence shared by everything that merits the name art, then when we talk about art, we simply gibber (i.e. talk nonsense) The defining quality of art is Significant Form i.e. patterns of lines, shapes and colour (and he allows some depth) that give rise to a distinctive emotion felt only in the presence of art, namely the Aesthetic Emotion. To call something a work of art is to commend it: for Bell it is obvious that many paintings, particularly descriptive paintings such as Frith's 'Paddington Station', were not really works of art: they lacked Significant Form.

The beauty of a butterfly's wing is different from the beauty in art, he tells us (Sebastian, a character in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited disagreed absolutely with this - how do we say who is right?). To appreciate art we need bring nothing of life - art is a separate realm that has the power to move the sensitive viewer. Most controversially, he maintains that what is represented in representational art has no bearing on it as art. Art is timeless - the same qualities in ancient art move us today. Past artists move us for the same reason that present day ones do. We don't need to know art history to appreciate art as art. The main instruments needed are good eyes and sensitivity. Objects all around us stand charged with this power to affect us.

His is a theory that approaches art very much from the stance of the spectator.It is also unashamedly subjective in that it begins with personal experience of the Aesthetic Emotion. That is the way we can tell that a work is a work of art. There is no criterion apart from this for discerning between mere form (everything has this in some sense) and Significant Form. In the section of his book called the Metaphysical Hypothesis Bell suggests that the reason Significant Form has such power to move us is that it gives us a glimpse of how the world really is, the world behind the veil of appearances (a view that mirrors Schopenahauer's account of music) .

As a theory of what art is, Bell's is open to a number of objections (I outline some of these in the first chapter of my book The Art Question ). For instance, defining art in terms of Significant Form and Significant Form in terms of the Aesthetic Emotion is  uninformative - it is a viciously circular defnition because we have no independent criteria for identifying either of these things.

More directly, for most of us, the fact that Rembrandt's self-portraits are depictions of the artist is a relevant factor when assessing these as art (on Bell's account, what is represented is not relevant) - true, formal properties are relevant too, but it is going too far to discount representation altogether.

Similarly we might not even understand what an artist was trying to do if we knew nothing of the history of the period and, in many cases, of the artist's other work, and expressed intentions. This does not mean that the artist's expressed views fully determine what a work of art means.

D.H. Lawrence (who was not just a novelist and poet, but a painter too) was scathing about the formalists' quasi-religious attitude towards Significant Form: he lampooned it in an essay about painting: 'I am Significant Form and my unutterable name is Reality. Lo, I am Form and I am Pure, behold I am Pure Form. I am the revelation of Spiritual Life, moving behind the veil. I come forth and make myself known, and I am Pure Form, behold I am Significant Form....Lift up your eyes to Significant Form, and be saved.'

Despite these criticisms, Bell's approach has the virtue of giving us a clear guide as to what we should do in the gallery: look closely at what is front of us, try to discount our awareness of what is represented, and focus on form and the possibility that it will move us deeply. 

In the gallery we looked at a range of images in the Matisse Cut Outs show (there's a summary of reviews and a short video about the show here). If Bell's approach doesnt work for this highly abstract art which so foregrounds the formal it is hard to see it working for any art...