Art and the Search for Meaning

By Robin Phillips

June, 2005

 

The Metaphysics of Art

 

             “Through art,” wrote Marcel Proust, “we can know another’s view of the universe.”[1] I would add to Proust’s maxim that any kind of art, but particularly visual art, tends to be a megaphone for the philosophy of the age, even when not directly reflective of the particular artist’s worldview. We have already seen this principle outworked in the way contemporary art has wrestled over the problem of beauty. However, the problem of beauty is actually only one of many areas where art has become a showcase for Enlightenment principles. In one sense, the entire direction contemporary art has gone is a direct result of the Enlightenment. However, I would like to narrow the field to simply considering the effects of empiricism on art.

 

 

Painting to Tell a Story

 

            Visual art has always been a means of portraying what we think is important, or what we consider to be meaningful, beautiful, worth remembering, and so on. Thus it is that when archeologists discover prehistoric art, preserved in cave drawings, they are able to infer something about the people that created the work. Perhaps the cave drawings tell us what certain peoples considered to be important, what activities played an important part in their culture or what things these people thought it worth recording and retelling.

            Another way of making the same point is to say that visual art tells a story. This is why visual art has always been seen to be more than merely a photographic representation of an event, person or place. If we do not understand this, we will always be confused when we approach artwork of the past. Take any of the thousands of mediaeval Madonnas. Did mediaval man really think the historical Mary would be dressed in such rich attire? Did they really think a little orange halo hovered above the Christchild? Of course they knew better than that, but such questions miss the point. The point is that mediaeval artists were trying to convey something deeper than merely mechanical representation of historical events. They were trying to convey a truth that went beyond the ordinary human experience that the eye could see. In this way, painting has always been a means, not of copying nature, but of portraying reality in a human way by depicting a human experience, human understanding, human insight or emotion into what the truth about reality is.

            Even when the Renaissance came along and artists began to have an interest, and newfound ability, to paint scenes more realistically, we find them still striving to convey something beyond the concrete particulars represented on canvas. Such paintings are closer to poetry than photography.

 

 

This is All There Is

 

            Of course, empiricism changed all this. The Enlightenment told us that there is no reality beyond what we can see, or if there is it is unknowable. When this philosophy eventually filtered down to art, we find artists like Courbet (1819-1877) saying things like, “I have never seen an angel, so I shall not paint one.”[2] We also find themes disappearing from art - paintings in which one thing is emphasized as being important. Speaking of this new tendency, initiated by the art of Courbet, Rookmaaker notes that the reason it was so controversial, and indeed revolutionary, was because it cried out that the things one can see are the only things that can be called true or important.[3]

   This philosophical shift did not mean that artists began painting scenes from everyday life where before they had painted angels. On the contrary, as early as the Renaissance, people had been painting from ordinary life as a way to celebrate the commonplace. Rather, the effect of empiricism was on how painters began interpreting the materials of everyday life. This is best understood by looking at the contrast in paintings before and after the Enlightenment. In 17th century Dutch artists like Vermeer and Rembrandt we find clear evidence of a pre-Enlightenment outlook. Like Courbet, these artists drew inspiration from the ordinary stuff of our experience, yet how different is the way they perceived ordinary experience. In the pre-Enlightenment world of Vermeer, such things as farmyards, kitchens, oxen and dirty roads “were seen as fruitful sources for a noble imagery” writes Thomas Howard.

 

There were implicit in the kitchen or the farmyard not boredom and thraldom and ignominy, but order and equanimity and the great, given rhythms of experience in which a man participates to his ennobling.[4]

 

            Thus it was that when pre-Enlightenment painters took the materials of ordinary life for their subjects, they infused that ordinary life with something special and ennobling. One comes away from Vermeer or Rembrandt with a deeper appreciation for God’s world, a sense that there is an air of splendour behind an old woman’s wrinkles, something ennobling about a peasant woman at the sink or a group of men at their daily work.

            The post-Enlightenment realists, on the other hand, could only paint things as they really are - meaning, of course, that things really are only what we see. There can be no implicit nobility behind ordinary things because there is nothing behind anything – the only reality is what we can observe empirically. So a woman at the sink is simply that…a woman at the sink and nothing more.

Recall Courbet’s very significant statement that he would not paint angels because he had not seen any. If it comes to that, one cannot see the glory, the dignity, the atmosphere of poetry behind ordinary life; rather, these are categories one must bring to bear on what one sees - categories which describe a particular outlook that has, at base, a spiritual rather than a materialistic orientation. Thus it was that after empiricism entered the bloodstream of Western culture, artists could no longer celebrate the commonplace in the same way, but instead began to reduce it to something humdrum, boring and eventually monotonous. Let’s look at life as it really is. When the word really is used like this, it usually means that an essential element has been left out. So in this case, to begin looking at life as it really is meant leaving behind all the “decent drapery” with which the imagination had enshrined, dignified and glorified human experience.

Thus, when Daumier (1808-1879) did his lithograph of Narcissus – the figure from Greek mythology who fell in love with his own reflection in the water and, not being able to take his eyes off the sight, died at the sight – he portrayed Narcissus as he would have really been to the empirical observer: a starving idiot with hollowed cheeks, stupidly grinning at his own reflection. Penelope - who patiently waited for her husband, Odysseus, to return from Troy - is likewise portrayed as she would have really been to an empirical observer: a haggard old woman, sentimentally looking at a worn portrait of her absent husband.

We might continue to trace this reductive empiricism throughout the history of post-Enlightenment art. When nudes are painted, they are no longer meant to be Venus or poetic figures from mythology, for that is not how things are in real life. Instead, artists painted nudes “as seen through the keyhole” (to use the painter Degas’ words): ordinary woman in their bedrooms – the places we would expect women to be naked.

Kings and other great men were painted in their daily, and all too common, reality. Religious paintings, as well, began to reflect this obsession with empirical acurasy. The spiritual themes which had previously dominated religious art begin to be replaced by nothing more than a photographic record of what the eye might have seen if one had been present. The result was a wave of Christian art that, though historically correct, was spiritually lifeless.

It is ironic that the elevation of empirical sight as the sole definer of reality has meant that there is less out there to see. Post-Enlightenment Westerners can say, with Wordsworth,

 

There was a time when meadow, grove,

    and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,

            To me did seem

         Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a deam.

It is not now as it hath been of yore; -

         Turn wheresoe’er I may,

            By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can

    see no more.[5]

 

 

The Search For Meaning

 

I have only described one principle that art followed after the Enlightenment. In actual fact, matters were much more complex, with many reactions and counter-reactions to realism. However, even in the reactions to realism, we find the influences of empiricism. Space prohibits any detailed discussion, but we might profitably consider a few further examples.

In the 19th century, the Romantic movement reacted against the Enlightenment. In looking for something beyond the stark actualities of empirical Fact, the Romantics looked within themselves for inspiration. The axioms of Romantic art were things like the artist’s attempt at self-expression and his quest for a personal vision and self-fulfilment. The Enlightenment had given an ordered and structured vision of the world, embodied in the classical poise of Mozart and Haydn’s music, which falls neatly into evenly balanced four and eight bar phrases. Romantic composers, on the other hand, drew from the reservoir of man’s ever changing, unpredictable emotions. Musical harmonies, like the colours on the artist’s canvas, begin to reflect the emotionally turbulent and unpredictable world of the self.

Romantic art was very beautiful and, in certain genres, represented the Golden Age for Western art. Yet it is not surprising that the Romantic movement was short lived. When the self is made the final centre of meaning, it cannot be long before all meaning lapses into subjective relativism. While the Enlightenment had emphasized man’s ability to find meaning through our perceptions of the ordered external empirical world, Romanticism emphasized man’s ability to find meaning through our perceptions of the unpredictable, emotional internal world of the self. Thus it was that both orientations, though very different, were still rooted in the same starting point: man and his perception.

As time went on, artists began to further explore the implications of this epistemology. Consider, impressionist art, which certainly seems to aim for something beyond merely empirical reality. Impressionist painting, particularly that of Cloud Monet, explored the epistemological problems raised by empiricism. Remember that empiricism had made reletavism a possibility. Since empiricism affirmed that the only way to know anything was through sensations such as sight, sound, etc., is it ever possible to know what is really out there externally? Do we have direct access to reality, or do we only have accept to our perceptions of reality? Berkeley dealt with this problem by saying that the entire world exists in God’s mind. You, me, and all the world is nothing but a thought – God’s thought. When Hume came along, he dispensed with the theistic framework and was left with total scepticism. We cannot really have certain knowledge about the external world, he said, all we can know is our own perceptions of the world.

This was the philosophical backdrop to Impressionist painting and music. When Monet painted, he did not try to record external reality, nor did he even try to record what he saw; rather, he tried to record the sensation experienced by his eyes. He recorded the light beams that reached his retina. Gene Edward Veith explains the matter as follows:

 

The Impressionists painted according to how the human eye actually perceives objects. When we look out into space, we are not able to focus upon everything at once. Blurs, indistinct shapes, tricks of light and shadow are all part of our perception. Our minds sort them out and allow us to focus sharply upon certain objects and to filter out the rest. Just as a television image consists of tiny dots of light that the mind assembles into realistic-appearing shapes, human perception is based on the mind’s ability to assemble and interpret optical information as light makes faint impressions upon the retina. The Impressionists studied optics and the physiology of perception and tried to capture the play of light in daubs of color that fuse into effervescent images of reality.[6]

 

The Impressionists recorded the only reality that empiricism allowed: the reality of sensations. This created a dreamlike, ethereal, even unreal quality to their works. Reality does not seem quite so real. Listening to the Impressionist music of Claude Debussy, we never quite know where we have come from or where we are going – we simply drift along in an ethereal world of musical shapes and colours.

As time progressed, artists extrapolated these problems to the inevitable point of dispensing completely with external reality. It happened gradually, and as art travelled the path through Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Formalism, Abstract Expressionism, etc, one can sense artists both holding back and reaching forwards to the inevitable corollary of complete relativism and irrationality.[7] At each stage, new norms were proposed in the hope of finding some alternative framework that might lend meaning to art. The new norms might last for a while, until some radical comes along and busts them to pieces by proposing something else, one stage further removed from objective reality.[8] In this way, step by step, the objective fixities of the empirical world have become subsumed in the confused and relative world of the artist’s psyche.

Of course, this all seems like the ultimate contradiction, not simply of empiricism, but of the entire Enlightenment. Well, it is and it isn’t. The Enlightenment built on the assumption that objective meaning could be found in a world where man was at the centre. What we have learned since then is that man is simply unable to carry that burden. If the art of today shows us anything, it shows us the consequences of putting man’s perception at the centre of everything. In the end, there is nothing meaningful to perceive except ourselves. Thus we find much contemporary art being designed in such a way as to direct our attention back on to ourselves. Not to long ago I was at an exhibition of paintings where one of the artists had written about his own work, saying, “The images invite us to explore our own psyche so that we may ultimately discover things about ourselves.” This is a typical line to take - perhaps the only line we can ultimately take - in a world where the individual has become the ultimate frame of reference. What seems like knowledge is really the reflection of your own inner world, so you look outside only to be directed back inside.

 

 

What You See is What you Get

 

The art of today is not entirely an ingrown reflection of our subjective psyche. In fact, there has been a polarization in two very different directions. On the one hand, art is obsessively occupied with the landscape of our internal worlds; on the other hand, we have artists strugling to portray the external world with such impersonal detachment that there is little left in their works that can actually be called art. Consider Carl Andre’s rectangular instillation of unworked fire bricks at the Tate, or Duchamp urinal, or Robert Gober’s doughnuts on a pedestal, or Walter de Maria stainless-steel bar, or Andy Warhol’s eight hour video of an actor sleeping (an example of, so called, ‘performance art’). If ever art strove to be realistic, to give us the cold actualities of life, here it is. Here is art that tells us, loud and clear, that what you see is what you get.

While we have pretty much got accustomed, and even come to expect, art that is an expression of our subjective internal worlds, we are still struggling to come to terms with this kind of obsessive hyper-realism. When any object is turned into art, whether it be a soup can, a urinal, or light bulbs switching on and off, the mind instinctively begins to search for invisible aesthetic meanings. It is as if the human mind is programmed to automatically hunt out deeper meanings beyond the level of empirical reality. Western man may have been able to finally stop looking at the universe and saying, “This cannot be all there is, there must be something more,” though he has more difficulty being so passive with his art. When Martin Creed won the Turner Prize in 2001 by exhibiting an empty room where the lights kept switching on and off, it was hard to accept his work as simply at face value: no, no, the light’s remorseless snapping on and off must be “an ominous experience, redolent of a wider malfunction that nobody knows how to correct…”[9] Okay, very deep, but what if the artist simply meant the empty room with malfunctioning lights to be an empty room with malfunctioning lights?[10] Since it is in our nature to “romanticize” or “aestheticize” our experience, seeing the visible as images of the invisible, we are still struggling to accept, on its own terms, art that is not meant to be an image of anything.

This was a struggle that the artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) faced when working with his “Readymades” (ordinary objects, such as his famous urinal, that were taken and displayed as art). Speaking of his work, Duchamp wrote,

 

I had to be careful to avoid the “look” {of being art}. It’s very difficult to choose an object, because after two weeks you either love it or hate it. You have to become so indifferent that you have no aesthetic feeling. The choice of Readymades is always founded on visual indifference and a total lack of good or bad taste.”[11]

 

Duchamp is not alone in his quest – indeed, his struggle – for aesthetic indifference. The artist Josef Albers, similarly, said “I want my art to be as neutral as possible.”[12] The art critic Monroe Beardsley noted, with displeasure, the way in which “The disconnection of art from the aesthetic has been hailed as the most significant development in contemporary visual art, as a final freeing of the artist from all obligation.”[13] Joseph Kossuth argued that “It is necessary to separate aesthetics from art because aesthetics deal with opinions on perception of the world in general.”[14]

The outcome of this attempt to disengage art from all aesthetic qualities is a large corpus of works – made up of everything from fire bricks to urinals - which has striven towards the ideal of complete aesthetic indifference. Yet such work remains only one side of the coin, for many artists, and nearly all the critics, still want to take aesthetic qualities very seriously. That is, they still want art to be more than merely “what you see is what you get.” Indeed, if art were completely reduced to such empirical terms, it is hard to see what meaningful things we could say about artworks, apart from purely technical observations. Yet empiricism has placed great restraints on what there is for artists to convey. In no longer being able to look at the empirical world to perceive images of thraldom and ignominy, order and equanimity, the artist who is seeking a deeper reality can only direct his gaze inward, or else use art to create a kind of make-believe fantasy world. It is in the later case that beauty still lingers in contemporary art, particularly on a commercial level. People enjoy the shallow kind of beauty that can be used almost as a kind of therapy to assure us that all is well in the world.

 

The Death of Content

 

The philosophy that every person creates his own frame of reference is one of the factors that has led to the demise of content in artworks. No longer is the meaning of a work governed by the content; rather, the viewer is free to create his own meaning for an artwork. Though there has always been a sense in which great works invoke a response that is personal and unique, it has only been comparatively recently that viewers are encouraged to exercise complete autonomy in how they respond to works. Julian Spalding tells how, in recent times, many artists “came to see the very concept of a work of art as a form of dictatorship” and attempted to make “art to be more of a give and take between the artist and the viewer.”[15]

In practice, this has resulted in artists making the content of their works intentionally opaque. Oldenburg’s Placid Civic Monument is a prime example. Oldenburg’s “Monument” consisted of a hole the artist had dug in the ground of New York’s Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum, and then filled back in again. “Oldenburg tells us that the thing includes all that is related to the event of digging and filing the hole, but did not happen at the spot of the event, such as the deliberations of the Park Board. The whole park and its connections are supposed to enter into it and he also tells us that it is open to any interesting interpretation.” [16]

Open to any interesting interpretation? This would not be so shocking if it were not a reflection of the commonplace assumption that any interpretation can be valid (in this case, any interesting interpretation). Since a work can now mean whatever anyone wants it to mean, it is not really the “done thing” to go into a modern art gallery and start asking, “What does this and that mean?” or “What was the artist trying to convey here?” Given the fact that so much contemporary art has a conceptual underpinning, you would have thought that such questions would be prior to proper evaluation. But no, the art of today has transcended the crude fixity of objective content – the viewer is liberated to create his or her own meaning. (Of course, this is rarely consistently applied, and we know that certain responses are really thought to be wrong, such as philistinism, bourgeois prejudice or the whole plethora of responses – such as “But what does it mean?” - which show he or she just does not “get it.” This is comparable to the liberation of sexuality, which has also resulted in the establishment of new taboos.)

Tilghman complained about this when he reminded us that

 

Not just any description or interpretation can be true of, or relevant to, a work of art, or anything else, for that matter. The subject of any interpretation is the subject of no interpretation. The object of this kind of critical generosity has no value; anything whatsoever would do just as well.[17]

 

 

Form and Content

           

The content of artworks have also suffered violence through the unnatural disjunction of  form and content. At first this may sound rather complicated, but it is really quite simple. The form of an artwork is simply the vehicle by which the content or meaning is communicated. Put another way, form is the building blocks out of which an artwork – whether visual art, literary art, musical art, etc. – is constructed. This is best understood by way of example. In the art of poetry, the form might be iambic pentameter or couplets or limerick or something else, while the content is the actual words or meaning that fill up that form. In the musical arts we have the form of the sonata, the form of the symphony, the form of the minuet, etc., and on a more basic level the elements of phrasing, tonality, etc.. It is through these musical forms that the content of a piece is mediated. In the visual arts, form is to do with light, colour, shape, etc. and this is the means through which the content of a painting or sculpture can be mediated.

            It will be seen that form and content are very much related, and indeed, the dividing line between the two is often fuzzy. Some artists have tried to separate the two, and immediately the formalist movement comes to mind. The formalists imagined that the aesthetic qualities of art resided only in the “significant form”, with the consequence that you could isolate the aesthetic quality of the form from the “irrelevant representative or descriptive element” of the content.[18] Applying this idea to it’s logical absurdity, the formalist Bell is known to have composed a poem of pure gibberish with the same form as a certain poem by Milton which, so he claims, possessed “all, or almost all, the merits of the original…”[19] The idea was to achieve pure sounds untainted by meaning.

While the absurdity of such a theory is clearly evident, we should be wary of more subtle manifestations of the formalist tendency. We see this tendency in contemporary art music where sound becomes an end in itself. Also in painting there is always the tendency to make the formal means (light, formal proportion, shape, etc.) an end in itself rather than the means of conveying content. In this way, many painters reduce the human figure to an object on which to experiment with colour, light, proportion, etc.. Compare how Rembrandt treated the subjects of his portraits vs. Picasso. In Rembrandt’s portraits we always get a sense of the content of the person, whereas Picasso reduces the person merely to an art form. Veith tells us of the way

 

Picasso would break down the volume and space occupied by an object into a grid of cubes or other geometrical analogues. He would observe the object’s formal characteristics, then exaggerate and recombine them.[20]

 

In this way, Picasso, and those who followed in his footsteps, reduced the human person to form, like a sociologist who sees people merely as statistics or a doctor who begin to see people merely as impersonal physical systems or a politician who treats people merely as voters or a man who treats women as sex objects. In each of these cases, form is allowed to drown out the content of the person.

Since form and content are intrinsically interrelated, one cannot separate the two without doing damage to both. To illustrate this I have refered to paintings of people, but this is not to imply that a work must have representational elements for there to be a proper union of form and content. After all, representational content is not the only kind of content available to artists, as we know from the musical arts where all content is abstract. Abstract visual art has a notable pedigree that has included everything from ancient tapestries to many of the decorative features prescribed in the Bible for Solomon’s temple. Such works can have a proper union of form and content while still being abstract.

 

 

The Death of Form

 

Just as artists have striven to release form from the contraints of content, so more recently they have striven to release art from its forms.

In its original meaning, “art” meant craft or skill, thus implying that there are standards and gradations of value, as there are with any skill. (Our own language still retains a memory of this broader use of the term art when we say, for example, that it is “a real art” to manage this particular business, referring to the skill involved, or when we refer to the “art” of the tailor or carpenter.) Inevitably, if artists were to break free from all external restraints, they would want to break free from needing to exhibit skill or to keep within the basic forms of the medium.

Breaking free from the forms governing the artist’s medium was a progressive process, and one in which the unhelpful polerization between fine art and mechanical art (and the implied disjunction between the hands and the head) played an important role.[21] The craft involved in the mechanical arts has become increasingly relegated to commercial manufacturers and, by extention, to the machine, while the craft involved in the fine arts has become increasingly irrelevent in the cilebrial vortex into which art has now been “liberated.”

In his book The Painted Word[22], Tom Wolfe traces the process by which art has been liberated from the formal structures governing the craft. At one time artists were content to be liberated simply not to paint representational objects. Soon, however, they thought it necessary to get rid of the third dimension altogether. Hence, the fixation with flatness that entered the art world for a while. Then they got rid of airiness, brush strokes and most of the paint. It wasn’t long before they were liberated from having to use colour at all. Inevitably, the painting frame was the next thing to go, and Frank Stella turned the canvas into a frame and hung it on the wall with nothing in the middle. Hence, we entered what Wolfe describes as “the era of ‘shaped canvases’…” That went alright for a while until artists such as Robert Hunter and Sol Lewitt challenged the bourgeois idea of hanging pictures up in the first place. They began painting directly on the gallery walls or on the walls outside the gallery window. But hold on…what about the wall itself? Or the gallery? So begins “earth Art.” But what of the idea of a permanent work of art at all? Hence, certain works of conceptual art where the process of creation is emphasised over the object itself. But what about the process of creation? What about the artist? All these things have and are being challenged in turn.

Art has thus become so liberated that anything can now be art. It has been up to the philosophers to try to keep the very word from lapsing into complete vacuity. Hence, over the last fifty years, the question “What is art?” has received more attention than any other single question in the various journals of philosophical aesthetics. Theorists have attempted to solve this problem by proposing an “institutional theory” of art. There are many different variations on this theory, but in its original form it states that

 

A work of art in the classificatory sense is (1) an artifact (2) a set of the aspects of which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld).[23]

 

This is a very complicated way of saying that anything can be art as long as someone says it is. When a member of the institution of the art world makes or selects an “artefact for appreciation”, the status of art-ness is thereby conferred on the object. So who can do this? Who is a member of the art world? According to Dickie (the chief proponent of the institutional theory), “every person who sees himself as a member of the artworld is thereby a member.”[24] So for something to become art, at least one person who considers himself a member of the artworld decides that an artefact (in the broadest possible sense of the term, for I am told that artefactuality can also be conferred) is a candidate for appreciation and…low and behold, it becomes art. (I have actually attempted this on my computer, which I have long appreciated but only recently thought of turning into art through an act of conferral. The experiment proved so successful that I have undertaken the more ambitious act of conferring the status of ‘candidate for appreciation’ on the rest of my life as an impromptu performance art.) The status of artifactuality can be conferred upon an unworked object, and thus the definition encompasses the numerous examples where an artists ‘creates’ a work simply by specifying some entity as his piece. Robert Barry, for example, specified his piece as being the following:

 

“All the things I know but of which I am not at the moment thinking – 1:36 P.M.: 15 June 1969, New York”…[25]

 

Dickie admits that “under the definition anything whatever may become art” [26] and advances this as one of the theory’s advantages. (There is some debate as to whether conferral can be retroactive. Also, I have read serious scholarly debate about whether conferral can apply to such things as grandmother’s arthritis.)

If something becomes art simply by calling it art – or, in more technical lingo, “conferring a status upon it” - then the difference between art and non-art is not substantial but semantical. Yet still, there remains a certain profundity to the institutional definition, for it surely encapsulates the principle on which so much contemporary art is based, namely, “if someone calls it art, it’s art” (to quote Donald Judd.) Art has become synonymous for anything an artist wants it to be.

When the difference between art and non-art is located merely in a verbal gesture, it is not surprising to find artists sometimes unable to identify art unless they are told. I understand that one artist had to be banned from a gallery because he ate Robert Gober’s latest creation – a bag of doughnuts on a pedestal. I am also told that unenlightened workmen at the Tate accidentally threw away Andre’s precious pile of bricks, thinking they were rubbish. I was told by one artist (but have not verified it) that when Andre was commissioned to re-supply the exhibition, he went down to the local builder’s merchants, stole 120 bricks, and charged the Tate another £30,000. Other cases exist where the opposite has happened, and an object never intended to be art has been mistaken for it, as in the art gallery that had glass over part of the floor as a result of a broken window. I am told that the broken glass was thought to be art by more than one extremely contemplative onlooker. Thankfully I have not yet heard of anyone finding out too late that Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ was never meant for it’s functional use. The artist Walter de Maria has gone through much effort to ensure that no one will ever mistake his High Energy Bar for just an ordinary stainless-steel bar. He initiated a licensing procedure in which he gave the steel bar a certificate bearing the name of the work and stating that the bar is a work of art. There is, however, an interesting twist since the certificate states that the bar is a work of art only when the certificate is present with it. Take away the certificate for five minutes and apparently the bar reverts back to just an ordinary bar (and, therefore, dropping in its monetary value) until the certificate is brought back.

You would think that such specificity concerning the status of a work would prevent anyone mistaking it for anything but a work of art. Think again. Might not the certificate, along with the inscription upon it, be a work of art in itself? How do we know that the purpose of the certificate is to refer to the steel bar rather than to be a work in itself? Binkley describes a similar scenario when he visited an exhibition of conceptual art. He came across a small brown spiral notebook. At first Binkley wondered whether the notebook was part of the exhibition until he noticed that it bore the inscription “Not part of the exhibition.” He was just about to disregard the notebook as unworthy of attention when the thought occurred to him that perhaps that notebook with that inscription might be one of the works on exhibition. He finally approached the director of the exhibition and learned directly from her that the notebook was not art.

Perhaps Binkley was satisfied too easily. How could Binkley know that when the director said the notebook was not part of the exhibition, that her act of speaking was part of a ‘performance art’ that she was inacting? After all, interactive and impromptu performance arts are becoming increasingly popular. If Annie Sprinkle can masturbate as part of her ‘performance art’, then who’s to say that a director of an exhibition cannot lie to spectators as an example of yet another kind of subversive performance?

Such are some of the paradoxes that are now facing the world of contemporary art. It is all to easy to laugh it all off, to treat contemporary art as one big joke. Yet it is no joke. As artists have striven to release both form and content from any remnant of external solidity, art itself is left rebounding in the infinite abyss of meaninglessness. The concept of art remains like the grin on the Cheshire cat lingered once the substance had been taken away, and we can only resort to complicated liscencing procedures or acts of retroactive conferal in a final desperate attempt to give some lingering meaning to the concept. Yet it is hardly surprising that we do not know anymore what art means, for neither do we really know what it means to be a human being. Yes, we may laugh, though perhaps it would be more appropriate to be sombre. This is where the Enlightenment has left us, and it is hardly very funny.

 

 

 

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[1]    Marcel Proust, Maxims, cited by Rookmaaker, p. 11.

[2]    Cited by Rookmaaker, p. 60.

[3]    Ibid, p. 61.

[4]    Thomas Howard, Chance or the Dance? (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1969), )pp. 83-84.

[5]    William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” Poetical Works of Wordsworth (Oxford University Press, 1904), p. 460.

[6]    Veith, p. 77.

[7]   This progression is just as obvious in the musical arts as in painting, where all external restraints have successively disappeared, so that it is not uncommon now to find works in which there is not merely an absence of tonality and time signatures, but a cultivated abolition of any organizing musical framework.

[8]  Dr. Kooning expressed something of this the following poem:

 

Every so often a painter has to destroy

painting. Cezanne did it. Picasso did it

with Cubism. Then Pollock did it. He busted

our idea of a painting all to hell. Then

there could be new paintings again.

 

[9]    Richard Cork, “People ask: ‘But is it art?’ Yes, actually, it is” The Times.

[10]    This, of course, raises the common question as to what role the artist’s intention has in governing our response. I have explored this problem in my essay ‘Intention and Meaning in Works of Art’ at http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/largerhope/Intention%20&%20Meaning.htm

[11]   Cited in Pierre Cabanne, The Brothers Duchamp (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1976), p. 141.

[12]   Julian Spalding, The Eclipse of Art: Tackling the Crisis in Art Today (Prestel, 2003), p. 49.

[13]   Monroe Beardsley, “Redefining Art” in Theories of Art & Beauty (Milton Keynes, The Open University, 1991), p. 56.

[14]    Joseph Kossuth, “Art after Philosophy”, Studio International 178 (Nov. 1969), p. 134.

[15]    Julian Spalding, ibid, p. 38.

[16]    B. R. Tilghman, “But is it Art?” in Art: Context & Value (Milton Keynes: The Open University), p. 248. See also Barbara Haskell, Claes Olfenburg: Object into Monument (Pasadena: Pasadena Art Museum, 1971), p. 62.

[17]    Tilghman, ibid, p. 248.

[18]    Clive Bell, Art (Chatto and Windus, 1915), p. 28. Speaking of Raphael’s Transfiguration, the formalist critic and close friend of Bell, Roger Fry, argued that “we are liable to have our aesthetic reactions interfered with” if we look at such a painting with its “dramatic overtones and implications” in mind. It is only by becoming “absorbed in [its] purely formal relations… by the pure contemplation of the spatial relations of plastic volumes”, that we can isolate that “aesthetic quality” of the work which is “the one constant quality of all works of art” (Roger Fry, Vision and Design (Chatto, 1926), pp. 197-198). The corollary to the idea that content is aesthetically irrelevant was Bell’s statement that “To appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions… We need bring with us nothing but a sense of form and colour and a knowledge of three-dimensional space.” (Bell, ibid, p. 25 & 27) For some good examples of why it is not possible to separate formal from representative properties, see Anne Sheppard Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 46. See also Oswald Hanfling, Philosophical Aesthetics (Milton Keynes: The Open University, 1992), pp. 57-63.

[19]   Clive Bell, Old Friends (Chatto, 1926), p. 76.

[20]    Veith, op. cit., p. 81.

[21]   Wladyslaw Tatarkiewics explains about this polarization, which occurs at the time of the 18th century in  “Art: history of the concept” reproduced in Theories of Art and Beauty, Ibid, p. 23. See also Veith, ibid, and Spalding, ibid. The philosopher R. G. Collingwood has taken this to it’s furthest point by arguing that “Art has something to do with making things, but these things are not material things, made by imposing form on matter, and they are not made by skill.” (Collingwood, ‘The Principles of Art’ in Theories of Art & Beauty, ibid, p. 355) Works of art, according to Collingwood, “‘exist in a person’s head’ and nowhere else…” (‘The Principles of Art’ in Theories of Art & Beauty, ibid, p. 364.) Collingwood acknowledges that the artwork may be externalised, but maintains that this is secondary and it is not a necessity for the work to be fully finished and complete.

[22]   See Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1975), pp. 97-103.

[23]   George Dickie, “Art and the aesthetic” in Art: Context & Value, ibid, p. 230.)

[24]   Ibid, p. 231

[25]    Cited by Tilghman, ibid, p. 242.

[26]   Ibid, p. 238