art and allusion

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

7 Ways of Thinking About Art: Notes from Session 6

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

Notes from Session 1

Notes from Session 2

Notes from Session 3

Notes from Session 4

Notes from Session 5

 

Art as Political

This week we focussed on one aspect of art as political: the subversion of stereotypes in art. Stereotypes are convenient general categorizations, but few people want to be seen as stereotypical and thinking in terms of stereotypes is often reductive and sometimes completely misleading. The use of stereotypes is a kind of essentialism, a way of suggesting that there is an essence shared by members of a group or class. For an interesting discussion of our essentialising (and over-essentialising) tendencies, read this interview with the psychologist Susan Gelman.

In the gallery we looked at works in the room 'Double Life' most of which overtly challenged stereotypes of women. (You might be interested in a Tate Modern presentation by two founding members of the Guerilla Girls from 2006 and their website  www.guerillagirls.com). 

Next week - the final session of the course: art as curated. 

7 Ways of Thinking About Art: Notes from Session 5

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

Notes from Session 1

Notes from Session 2

Notes from Session 3

Notes from Session 4

 

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. (in painting

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 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...).

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 spent looked at paintings in the 'Realisms' room, considering features of the paintings that might justify the claim that they are 'realistic' in some respect (as opposed to simply being products of a group of painters who called themselves 'realists')...

Next week, the penultimate session of this course: Art as Political...

7 Ways of Thinking About Art: Notes from Session 4

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

Notes from Session 1

Notes from Session 2

Notes from Session 3

Art as Material

This week we considered the physicality of artworks, approaching them from the point of view of the materials of their construction. It is an odd quirk of museum caption-writers that they almost always include a list of the materials from which the work has been made (a convention that gets tricky and more interpretative when it comes to the conceptual end of the spectrum - what, for example, is the medium of Martin Creed's The Lights Going on and Off (answer: an electrical timer - but that doesn't seem quite accurate as a description), or even of Tracy Emin's My Bed (answer: matress, linen, pillows, objects - again, doesnt seem quite right - why are the pillows given the status of readymades, but not the sheets?). Is Jeff Koons' Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank made from three basketballs and liquid and perspex, or is it made from rubber, air, liquid and perspex? (intriguingly Koons used different makes of basketball for different versions - should that be part of the caption?).

Why might we be so interested in the medium anyway? Certainly, the knowledge provided by the caption (which we take to be an accurate factual description) colours our interpretation and creates expectation.

Answers include:

The general point that information of this kind helps us understand what we are looking at and what sort of choices the artist has made.

It might not always be possible to work out what the medium is just by looking - e.g. Jeff Koons' 'inflatables' look as if they are ballons - knowing they are constructed from stainless steel makes a different to our interpretation of them (as a kind of trompe l'oeil, rather than readymades) - see for example his famous Rabbit. If you accept Bernard Berenson's tactile theory of art, you might even think that such knowledge affects your muscular reactions to what you are seeing 

[Digression:

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. These ideas might be extended to thinking about moving and touching the surface of sculptures - when actual touch is impossible, imagined touch is based in part on our understanding of what it is that we might touch - in the case of Koons' 'inflatables', stainless steel, rather than plastic. For more on touching and imagining artworks, see these notes from a previous course which included a Tate Modern touch tour ] - end of digression!

Once we know that we are looking at a work in a certain medium, we are likely to scrutinize that work in a different way, seeing features of the work that we might otherwise overlook. The knowledge shapes our seeing (which is never neutral). Knowing that a Chuck Close or Gerhard Richter painting is a painting in oil rather than a photograph is important to our assessment of it.

More cynically, caption writers often aim at a degree of neutrality. When writing miminal captions, and, generally, specifying media is an uncontroversial factual matter - an easy option, then, when compared with interpretative writing.

There may, too, be historical explanations of where this captioning convention came from (early museums were keen to separate the natural from the products of human ingenuity). But showing the origins doesn't necessarily justify this widespread practice now.

(More ideas welcome) 

In Tate Modern we focussed on a range of Arte Povera works, paying close attention to the textures, and juxtapositions of materials. All the works foregrounded medium - none were overtly representational. The choice of medium was something that the viewer was intended to recognize as an artistic decision - the deliberate use of non-conventional raw materials of lumps of concrete and wire, carpet underfelt, a timber beam, latex, a sheet and a glass vessel. These unconventional choices, however, would be obvious to the viewer independently of captioning. By presenting these juxtapositions of materials as artworks, the artists draw attention to features of the materials that would be easy to overlook, make them strange again, and somehow poetic.

One work stood out. Giuseppe Penone's Tree of 12 Metres in which he re-discovered a younger form of a tree within a huge timber beam by carving back through the knots to reveal the branches and trunk as they were in one year of the tree's life. Here he shaped the unpromising medium of a cracking rough-hewn timber beam into a work of art that draws attention to previously unseen aspects of the wood - the inner tree (a process of revelation that has obvious resonances with the way our pasts are carried within us). It is not as if this work could have been expressed in a related medium (unless that happened to be a different type of timber) - the work was only possible in that medium, and it is the medium itself which is in large part the subject matter.

Next week, Art as Realistic (Tate Modern)

 

7 Ways of Thinking About Art: Notes from Sesssion 3

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

Notes from Session 1

Notes from Session 2

Session 3: Art as Historical

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

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

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

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

This week we were in Tate Britain, and that gave us a chance to look at works from the perspective of a historical style, in this case Romanticism. Romanticism (like Modernism) was a movement that found expression across a wide range of the arts, and which was in large part a reaction to the optimistic rationality of some aspects of the Englightenment and to Ne0-Classicism - it flourished in the early to mid- ninteenth century, but had its roots in 18th century thinking. In painting, it was characterised by, amongst other things, a concern with natural elemental forces - Romantic artists were not attempting accurate mirrors held up to nature, but rather expressed their subjective and often turbulent emotional responses to the world. The artist was seen as an original genius, typically misunderstood, and outside of the mainstream, but with the courage to follow his or her own path. In landscape painting Romantic artists were often influenced by the idea of the sublime rather than the beautiful. The notion of the sublime was resurrected and given philosophical coherence by Edmund Burke's book, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime of 1757. A complete online searchable text of Burke's Enquiry is available here.

Burke's account of our responses to beauty and the sublime focuses on the bodily and emotional responses to physical objects. Burke gave clear expression to idea that beauty may not be the only quality in nature and art that moves us profoundly. He maintained, quite plausibly, that pain and pleasure aren't on the same spectrum. A reduction of pain does not automatically lead to an increase in pleasure (though, in his terminology, reduction of pain results in delight). Pain is effective in our self-preservation; pleasure makes social interaction possible. Pain has the power to move us more profoundly than pleasure. To back up this claim he points out that few would agree to a life of exquisite pleasures if they knew that this would end with brutal torture.

Burke described beauty as 'for the greater part, some quality in bodies, acting mechanically upon the human mind by the intervention of the senses'. Beauty is a quality that tends to produce pleasure.

The sublime in contrast is always in some way linked with terror. Not complete terror, but rather with the potential for danger. Causes which under different circumstances might endanger us evoke the emotions of the sublime.

The key passage in which Burke contrasts the beautiful and the sublime, from Section XXVll of the Enquiry [NB he uses 'the great' as a synonym for 'sublime' here at several points]:

 "For sublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones comparatively small;beauty should be smooth, and polished; the great rugged and negligent; beauty should shun the right line, yet deviate from it insensibly; the great in many cases loves the right line, and when it deviates, it often makes a strong deviation; beauty should not be obscure; the great out to be dark and gloomy; beauty should be light and delicate; the great ought to be solid, and even massive. They are indeed ideas of a very different nature, one being founded on pain, the other on pleasure..."

Burke believed that the reason we frequently take delight in intrinsically painful situations - an apparent paradox [related to the Paradox of Tragedy - listen to a podcast on Paradox of Tragedy] is that this is nature's way of toning up our nervous systems. While this last point isn't particularly persuasive, his general account of the contrast between beauty and the sublime has been extremely influential.

 In Tate Britain we visited the exhibition The Romantics, and partiularly the room Pictures for an Exhibition. Many of these pictures drew on the notion of the sublime, the viewer put in the position of being overwhelmed by natural phenomena, whether a mountain, or a thunder storm, or the force of an avalanche. Where figures were present, they were tiny in comparison to the elemental forces. Seeing these pictures as part of a school drew attention to different features than if, for example, we had seen each as formal arrangements (Clive Bell's approach). We also visited the room devoted to the so-called Neo-Romantics, painters such as Graham Sutherland, Paul Nash, and John Piper, who, painting in the 193os and 1940s, referred back in some ways (sometimes through explicit allusion, sometimes through parallel approach) to Romanticism. In this case the consensus of the group seemed to be that approaching the work through the notion of a period school was less useful than for 'Pictures for an Exhibition', and that many of the interesting aspects of these paintings had relatively tenuous links to Romanticism  (looking ahead to week 7 of this course, there are interesting issues raised her about the curator's share - the extent to which the grouping of these works as examples of a historical school highlights particular features of the paintings at the expense of others).

Next week: back to Tate Modern for Art as Material

7 Ways of Thinking About Art: Notes from Session 2

Art as Intentional

Read notes from session 1 of the course

For session 2 of the Tate Modern course 7 Ways of Thinking About Art (tickets only, sold out), we concentrated on the contrast between those, such as Clive Bell, who advocate scrutiny of form and those such as Richard Wollheim who argue that criticism and interpretation require retrieval, a kind of archaeology of the artist's intentions against a historical background.

Bell believed that what all art has in common is that it possesses Significant Form. Not all form is significant, but when patterns of lines, shapes and colours (and some depth) combine they can produce an aesthetic emotion in a sensitive viewer. All around us are objects charged with the capacity to move us aesthetically, but only the sensitive perceive and feel this. The beauty of a butterfly's wing, though, is not Significant Form for Bell - it is found in human creations, which may be as diverse as a Chinese carpet, the Cathedral at Chartres, or a painting by Duccio or Picasso. For Bell, we should bring nothing of life to art. All art through ages has achieved its status as art from these formal properties. The emotion they produce, aesthetic emotion, is not characteristic of everyday life. For Bell its power almost certainly came from its potential to put us in touch with the noumenal world (a Kantian term), that is the world of deeper reality that lies behind the veil of everyday appearances and is not usually available to us.

Another famous defence of anti-intentionalism was Wimsatt and Beardsley's famous paper 'The Intentional Fallacy'. ('Fallacy'  in this context is simply an unreliable way of arguing) There they argued that we shouldn't treat the author of a poem as an oracle about its meaning. Rather, readers should focus on the words on the page, and not get embroiled in author psychology. Their main argument was that appeals to authors' intentions were either misleading or unnecessary. If the poem failed to achieve the poet's intentions, then it was misleading to refer to the intentions as the source of its meaning; if the poem did achieve the aims, then appeals to intention were redundant since the meaning was there to be discerned in the poem.

The philosopher Stanley Cavell used a knock-down argument to make the first of these two points:

'...it no more counts towards the success or failure of a work of art that the artist intended something other than is there, than it counts when the referee is counting over a boxer that the boxer had intended to duck' (in 'Music Discomposed').

Difficulties with the anti-intentionalist position include the fact that as Ernst Gombrich often pointed out, there is no innocent eye. Also it is hard to appreciate irony if you don't have some access to the artist's or writer's intentions. Extreme anti-intentionalists would say that to appreciate a Rembrandt self-portrait the fact that the artist intended (if he did) to potray himself ageing, is irrelevant to our appreciaton of it as art - this seems wrong. Subject matter has to be part of some art. It also seems a bit perverse not to find out as much as you possibly can about the circumstances in which a work of art was produced.

For more about Clive Bell and why is theory of art fails, see Chapter One of my book The Art Question. The late Denis Dutton put an extract of the most pertinent passages from Bell's Art with very useful illustrations on his website. Wimsatt and Beardsley's paper 'The Intentional Fallacy' is reprinted in my book (ed.) Philosophy: Basic Readings, 2nd ed.

In contrast, intentionalists, such as Richard Wollheim, argue that the job of the critic or viewer involves retrieval, retrieval of an artist's intentions, motivations, historical milieu, and so on. Understanding a work of art involves understanding how it came to be as it is. Obviously information is incomplete in many cases, but this does not prevent it from being a worthwhile goal where we do have access to background information. Nor would Wollheim want us to forego spending time looking very closely at the work itself; it is just that the history of how it came to be as it is, its aetiology is important for understanding it.

For more on Intentionalism see Richard Wollheim 'Criticism as Retrieval' supplementary essay in the second ed. of his book Art and Its Objects. (For a fascinating discussion of a related question about why we value objects with particular histories rather than their indistinguishable copies, see Paul Bloom's interview 'Why do we like what we like?')

The philosopher Stephen Neale discusses the wider question of the importance of intentions to meaning and interpretation in this podcast interview from the Philosophy Bites series (highly recommended for his  discussion of  his involvement in the interpretation of US drugs law in relation to the use of firearms!). For a general discussion of the question 'What is Art?' listen to this Philosophy Bites audio interview with Derek Matravers.

A third position, taken by Jerry Fodor in his article 'It's Deja Vu All Over Again' (a quotation from the accidentally  brilliant Yogi Berra - my favourite quotation of his is 'When you come to a fork in the road, take it') is what might be called Virtual Intentionalism. Here the facts don't matter so much about what the artist's actual intentions were. The point is to try to reconstruct what they might reasonably have been. The artist can't overrule your interpretation here.
Fodor's article is in Danto and His Critics.

Something we didn’t get on to: the question of whether discussion of artist’s intentions implies a misleading picture of what it is to do something intentionally. Many writers in this area describe intentions as if artists had introspectible mental events that are the precursors of and causes of their works. But is this so? What of R.G. Collingwood’s account of art (in his The Principles of Art) where he described the artist as beginning with an inchoate emotion that he or she makes clear to him or herself in the process of producing a work of art. On that picture (which rings true with many artists), the idea that an artist has a clear intention that precedes the creation of the artwork is implausible in most cases.

In the galleries we visited 'Elements of Chance', 'The Reclining Nude', and Joseph Beuys, testing the stance of a formalist against that of an intentionalist in relation to particular works.

Next week: ticketholders meet in Tate Britain via Clore wing (NOT Tate Modern!) at usual time. We'll be in the Duffield Room, and then in the galleries. No drinks afterwards just for this week. Finishing time 8.30pm. More information about topics and dates of sessions.

 

7 Ways of Thinking About Art: Notes from Session 1

Art as Thought-Provoking

The main focus of this week’s session of 7 Ways of Thinking About Art (Tate Modern) was the tension between treating works of art as catalysts for subjective musing and the idea that they might (or should, to be any good) have definite objective meanings. I presented these two approaches as at opposite ends of a scale, though these may not be mutually exclusive. 

A key question is the degree to which works of art are like Rorschach inkblots: stimuli for projective interpretation, where autobiography, mood, and mental set of the viewer play a substantial role. Whilst it is naive to believe it possible to enter a gallery with an innocent eye, the mind cleansed of all associations and expectations, and plausible to think that seeing is, as the philosopher of science N.R. Hanson put it, 'a theory-laden activity' ('There is more to seeing than meets the eyeball'), there are still limits to interpretation.  We can't see whatever we want to see - our interpretations are based on something out there even if they are idiosyncratic or whimsical. Nevertheless, context and expectation have a significant role to play, as they do in most aspects of our life (read this interesting discussion of the psychology of why we like what we like)

Many appreciators of the visual arts are content that particular works of art should simply stimulate a range of interesting responses, and believe that art should be open-ended. It is an orthodoxy amongst views of contemporary art that didactic art tends to be bad art - it is in ambiguity and the possibility of generating new interpretations that art's value lies. In contrast to this view, Alain de Botton has recently asserted in his book Religion for Atheists, that good art can and should be didactic, that it should teach us through sensuous beautiful creations, to be good and wise.

You can listen to a short audio interview I made with Alain de Botton which includes a discussion of his view of art here. 

In the gallery we visited the Yayoi Kusama exhibition. 

 

Kusama's art can be enjoyed as visual experience and catalyst for reverie, but some of it has clear intended content - it is deliberately about something, and it is possible to misinterpret what it is about.  Some of the phallic imagery relates directly to her own fear of sex, as she has made clear in interviews. Although it is open to a range of interpretations, there are limits to what can be plausibly said about it. To interpret it, for example, as more aggressive and frightening than Louise Bourgeois's 'Filette' for example, would be odd.

In other pieces Kusama explores the concept of infinity (for a philosophical discussion of infinity and its significance, listen to this interview with Adrian Moore in the Philosophy Bites series).  The remarkable 'Infinity Mirrored Room' invites the viewer to immerse him or herself in an experience of infinite regress which is also quite beautiful.  This display of coloured lights suspended above water and surrounded by mirrors is suggestive of stars, of paper Japanese lanterns, and more. It invites a loss of self, much as Rothko's Seagram paintings do. Unlike artists who deliberately make the viewer feel tiny and overwhelmed in relation to the infite (see notes on Edmund Burke on the sublime for a philosophical connection with that tendency), Kusama in this piece has created an installation that is almost womb-like and comforting, while at the same time stretches to infinity, a Tardis-like play with space that expresses a fundamental warmth for humanity that runs throughout her work. 

There is also a short light-hearted interview with Kusama here.

Next week we'll be considering the degree to which an artist's intentions should shape our understanding of the work. If you want to start thinking about this topic in advance of next week's session (in Tate Modern) look at some notes from a previous version of this course.