CCB ≈ companion course blog - readings
week 2
week 3
week 5
week 7
week 9
week 10
week 11
week 12
week 13
week 1
• Stone Age Definition - http://www.ancient.eu/Stone_Age/
week 2
• Pre & Early History - Art a world history: pgs.13-3
week 3
• Art Basics - pgs. 1-32
week 5
• Renaissance dawn of a new age - Art a world history pgs.116-161
week 7
• Art in the 20th century, before 1945 - Art a world history pgs. 412 - 461
week 9
• Lick and Lather - Interview with artist Janine Antoni - CCB-readings
week 10
• Cubism - CCB-readings
• Marcel Duchamp and the "ready made" - CCB-readings
• 20th century art before 1945 - Art a world history pgs. 412 - 461
• Marcel Duchamp and the "ready made" - CCB-readings
• 20th century art before 1945 - Art a world history pgs. 412 - 461
week 11
• “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” + “On The Manner of Addressing Clouds” - CCB-readings
week 12
• Barthes and Semiotics - in class handout
week 13
• Myth Today, Roland Barthes - in class handout
• Art after 1945 - Art a world history pgs. 462 - 501
Course Companion Blog - readings
"Janine Antoni - Lick and Lather"
ART:21:
Let's talk about your sculpture "Lick and Lather" How was it made?
ANTONI:
I wanted to work with the tradition of self-portraiture but also the classical bust. So the way I made it is I took a mold directly from my body. I used a product called alginate, which is the kind of material that you might be familiar with when you go to the dentist. That sort of minty tasting stuff. It’s an incredible product because it gets every detail, every little pore. I even casted my hair. So I started with an exact replica and then I carved the classical stand. I made a mold, melted down thirty-five pounds of chocolate, poured it into the mold, and when I took it out of the mold I resculpted my image by licking the chocolate. So you can see that I licked up the front and through the mouth up onto the nose, over the eye and back up over the ear onto the bun and then down in the back around the neck.
I also casted myself into soap. She started as an exact replica of myself. We spent a few hours in the tub together. I slowly washed her down and she becomes almost fetal because all her features start to be washed away. So I was thinking about how one describes the self and feeling a little uncomfortable with my outer surface as the description of myself. And this piece very much is about trying to be on the outside of myself and have a relationship with my image. So the process is quite loving. Of course chocolate is a highly desirable material and to lick myself in chocolate is a kind of tender gesture. Having the soap in the tub was like having a little baby in there. But through that process I’m slowly erasing myself. For me it really is about this kind of love-hate relationship we have with our physical appearance.
ART:21:
Is it also erotic?
ANTONI:
Yes, well, the thing about chocolate is that it has the product fenylamine in it. That product is the chemical that’s produced in our body when we’re in love. So I think that’s why chocolate is so addictive.
ART:21:
Is there something humorous about this piece?
ANTONI:
I think what’s humorous about the piece is that I’m playing with a tradition of the classical bust, which is very serious. And I asked myself some questions about why, traditionally, would artists want to make a self-portrait. And I came up with a few answers for myself.
The first one is to immortalize yourself. But of course my materials are ephemeral, so I’m kind of trying to work against the grain of that. And it was a funny thing because I conceived the piece to be in the Venice Biennial and I knew that there would be classical sculpture everywhere. And I arrive in Venice, and as you probably know Venice is totally eroding. I came upon these stone sculptures and they looked very much like my soap head, because the features had been washed away. And I thought to myself, what does that say about our mortality that even stone has a lifespan?
And then the other answer I gave myself about why make a self-portrait is this idea of creating a public image of yourself. An image that you were presenting to the world. And I guess my question was—is that an accurate description of the self? And are we more ourselves alone at home eating a meal or in the bathtub, in these everyday activities? So that’s where I got the idea to work with the chocolate and the soap.
ART:21:
Can you talk about the arduous quality of making the piece?
ANTONI:
Yes, it took a long time to make the pieces. We spent several hours in the tub together. And I think what’s important about that is that we were very intimate with each other. And my hope is that you as a viewer can feel that intimacy. That’s what a portrait is — a way of getting close to the person that it’s depicting.
ART:21:
And beauty?
ANTONI:
In terms of the classical bust, an issue that my work deals with a lot is the idea of woman and beauty. And thinking about how women have been depicted traditionally in sculpture and trying to take that on... There’s something quite startling about the erasure of my process.
ART:21:
And also the classical bust is traditionally a man...
ANTONI:
The thing about the classical bust is it’s usually reserved for depicting men and usually very powerful men. And then when we see women in classical sculpture they depict hope and charity and love. I was particularly conscious of that when I made the bust and thinking about this act of erasure of this specific personality. With this particular bust here, I licked the chocolate and I licked right up the front and over the cheek. I also licked the eye and the lips and nose. And then I came around and licked you know over the ear and back onto the bun. And then I thought it would be nice to just lick under the nape of the neck, along up under the ear on the other side. It's modeling in the sense that when you carve, you start with a block and you remove from it. But what I’m doing is starting from a representation of myself and then removing from it.
ART:21:
What does the removal process signify for you?
ANTONI:
I think it’s a funny thing when you think about the creative process and what we go through when we’re making a work. A lot of times there’s this element of destruction. That we have to kind of unmake in order to make. And that interests me very much. And also working from very basic materials. I’m also thinking a lot about this idea that there’s this kind of relationship between me and her that I’m literally feeding myself with myself and washing myself with myself. So there’s this circular narrative that’s happening.
ART:21:
Is there a ritualistic aspect?
ANTONI:
Sure...I was thinking of everyday rituals like eating and bathing. But also other rituals. Certainly the Eucharist is about eating the body, so that also comes to mind.
ART:21:
How do you decide to shape a bust this way and not that? Is it simply intuitive?
ANTONI:
In terms of the creative process I think that I begin with a kind of conceptual structure. That I know to lick myself in chocolate means something, or to wash myself in soap means something. When I feel sort of comfortable with the security of a very, hopefully, rigorous conceptual structure, then I can actually let go of that kind of thinking. And when I go to wash or lick I’m not necessarily thinking about if I lick this area it means one thing or another, but really trying to get intimate with the process so a kind of surprise happens, especially with the soap bust. You know, I’m in the tub and all of a sudden this person appears to me and I’m not sure if she’s a relative or an alter-ego, but she’s related and yet different. And there’s something so beautiful about that process that lets her evolve through the process.
ART:21:
There's something happening in the actions you're performing...
ANTONI:
I think that because the process is so sort of gentle and loving, there is some kind of idea of self-love. You know of trying to come to terms with that surface being you. I think that, and I don’t know about you, but when I look in the mirror I don’t really recognize myself. I somehow see myself as I was as a little girl or in other manifestations of myself. So it’s always this contemplative moment of trying to come to terms with what I see and how that relates to what I feel inside and trying to bring those two things together. So I think with this whole process, you can imagine how jarring it is or how peculiar it is to lick yourself. It’s like being your own lover. Like putting yourself in the position of your lover and trying to understand what they’re seeing when they look at you.
ART:21:
Do you feel closer to the chocolate or the soap busts?
ANTONI:
I really feel close to the soap bust because we spent a lot of time in the tub together. And I just sort of rub her all over and you know she sort of smooths down and then she becomes almost fetal. It’s really quite a nice process. And it’s interesting to think about cleaning and purity. And just washing as a kind of ritual and its bigger meaning. I think this idea of cleaning is associated with purity.
I think I was thinking about purity in terms of woman, and that is a kind of idealized state which of course is in contrast to the chocolate. Another way that women have been thought about is in terms of desire. So the work is about looking at the flip side of those two states and not feeling comfortable with either.
The brown and white, really with all my work, it comes from the material. So I’m not so much thinking of myself in a dark color and myself in a white color. I’m thinking of myself in chocolate and myself in soap. But there is something beautiful about the way that in her purity she disappears.
ART:21:
Is there something about casting, in particular, that you enjoy? You seem to come back to that process in your work a lot.
ANTONI:
I don't know, I can think of a lot of things that aren't done that way. Certainly you have your skills and your knowledge and you use it, and maybe there are many different ways to make an object but you use the experience that you've had. So there are certain processes which seem to come back. I was just talking to Melissa about this this morning. We were moving some plywood around, and I'm like, "Why are we always making these diving boards?" Like the way we made the rope and then we use the same sawhorses to make the other piece. And I think we were talking about that, how there is this kind of repertoire that you come back to.
With mold making it's just that you look around and most of the objects around us are made that way. And because I am always trying to replicate or in some way work with everyday objects, everyday materials, I find myself there a lot. Also I am trying to make an everyday object out of another kind of material, so that casting it into that shape makes sense.
ART:21:
Is casting a ritual for you as well? Like transformation or trans-substanstiation?
ANTONI:
I was saying the mold making was about imitation, like I was trying to imitate these things from the world. For me the transformation happens somehow when I am working with the process. The process is what transforms it. Sometimes that's in the mold making but most of the time it's not. Usually, at least with "Lick and Lather", it's afterwards.
[2]
Cubism
Cubism was one of the most influential visual art styles of the early twentieth century. It was created by Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973) and Georges Braque (French, 1882–1963) in Paris between 1907 and 1914. The French art critic Louis Vauxcelles coined the term Cubism after seeing the landscapes Braque had painted in 1908 at L’Estaque in emulation of Cézanne. Vauxcelles called the geometric forms in the highly abstracted works “cubes.” Other influences on early Cubism have been linked to Primitivism and non-Western sources. The stylization and distortion of Picasso’s ground-breaking Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (Museum of Modern Art, New York), painted in 1907, came from African art. Picasso had first seen African art when, in May or June 1907, he visited the ethnographic museum in the Palais du Trocadéro in Paris.
The Cubist painters rejected the inherited concept that art should copy nature, or that they should adopt the traditional techniques of perspective, modeling, and foreshortening. They wanted instead to emphasize the two-dimensionality of the canvas. So they reduced and fractured objects into geometric forms, and then realigned these within a shallow, relief like space. They also used multiple or contrasting vantage points.
In Cubist work up to 1910, the subject of a picture was usually discernible. Although figures and objects were dissected or “analyzed” into a multitude of small facets, these were then reassembled, after a fashion, to evoke those same figures or objects. During “high” Analytic Cubism (1910–12), also called “hermetic,” Picasso and Braque so abstracted their works that they were reduced to just a series of overlapping planes and facets mostly in near-monochromatic browns, grays, or blacks. In their work from this period, Picasso and Braque frequently combined representational motifs with letters. Their favorite motifs were still lifes with musical instruments, bottles, pitchers, glasses, newspapers, playing cards, and the human face and figure. Landscapes were rare.
During the winter of 1912–13, Picasso executed a great number of papiers collés. With this new technique of pasting colored or printed pieces of paper in their compositions, Picasso and Braque swept away the last vestiges of three-dimensional space (illusionism) that still remained in their “high” Analytic work. Whereas, in Analytic Cubism, the small facets of a dissected or “analyzed” object are reassembled to evoke that same object, in the shallow space of Synthetic Cubism—initiated by the papiers collés–large pieces of neutral or colored paper themselves allude to a particular object, either because they are often cut out in the desired shape or else sometimes bear a graphic element that clarifies the association.
While Picasso and Braque are credited with creating this new visual language, it was adopted and further developed by many painters, including Fernand Léger, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Juan Gris, Roger de la Fresnaye, Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, and even Diego Rivera. Though primarily associated with painting, Cubism also exerted a profound influence on twentieth-century sculpture and architecture. The major Cubist sculptors were Alexander Archipenko, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Jacques Lipchitz.
The liberating formal concepts initiated by Cubism also had far-reaching consequences for Dada and Surrealism, as well as for all artists pursuing abstraction in Germany, Holland, Italy, England, America, and Russia.
Sabine Rewald
Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
October 2004
[3]
Marcel Duchamp and the "ready made"
Born in Normandy in northern France, Duchamp traveled back and forth between Europe and the United States for much of his life. His initial foray into modern art followed the trends of his contemporaries, with his first paintings in the mode of Cézanne and the Impressionists, while after 1910 his work reflects a shift toward Cubism. One of his most important works, Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912, Philadelphia Museum of Art) (a second version of a work on cardboard from 1911), however, reflects Duchamp’s ambivalent relationship with Cubism. He adopts the limited palette of Cubist paintings, but his invigorated figure is in a state of perpetual motion—a very different effect from Picasso and Braque’s Analytic Cubism that held figures tightly in place. Provoking negative reactions from even the Parisian avant-garde, the painting was rejected by the Salon des Indépendants for both its title and the artist’s mechanistic, dehumanizing rendering of the female nude. The following year, it sparked controversy at the New York Armory Show, helping to establish Duchamp’s reputation as a provocateur overseas and paving the way for his arrival in New York two years later.
Subverting traditional or accepted modes of artistic production with irony and satire is a hallmark of Duchamp’s legendary career. His most striking, iconoclastic gesture, the readymade, is arguably the century’s most influential development on artists’ creative process. Duchamp, however, did not perceive his work with readymade objects as such a radical experiment, in part because he viewed paint as an industrially made product, and hence painting as an “assisted-readymade.” Moreover, he had already begun to incorporate chance operations into his practice—for example, with 3 Standard Stoppages (1913–14)—and thus had already begun to surrender artistic control and empower other factors to determine the character of a work of art. With Bicycle Wheel (1913), the first readymade, Duchamp moved toward a creative process that was antithetical to artistic skill. He wanted to distance himself from traditional modes of painting in an effort to emphasize the conceptual value of a work of art, seducing the viewer through irony and verbal witticisms rather than relying on technical or aesthetic appeal. The object became a work of art because the artist had decided it would be designated as such. Bicycle Wheel consisted of a fork and the wheel of a common bicycle that rested upon an ordinary stool. The mundane, mass-produced, everyday nature of these objects is precisely why Duchamp chose them (later works would include a snow shovel, a urinal (Philadelphia Museum of Art), and a bottlerack (Philadelphia Museum of Art), to name a few). As a result, he ensured that the fruits of modern industrial life would be a fertile resource in the production of works of art.
Naturally, Duchamp’s iconoclasm appealed to the vehemently untraditional and bitingly critical nature of the Dada movement. His work can easily be understood as a forerunner to this revolutionary sensibility, which actively sought to undermine the reigning values of conservatism that governed Europe and that perpetuated the devastating reality of World War I. Duchamp’s own experience with Dada, however, occurred while he lived in New York, in the circle of Francis Picabia, a Franco-Cuban artist and writer, and the American painter and photographer Man Ray, as well as the American collectors Katherine Dreier and Louise and Walter Arensberg. The nature of New York Dada was less overtly political than its European strain. Instead, satirical works such as Duchamp’s readymade Fountain (1917) tested the limits of public taste and the boundaries of artistic technique. By pushing and ultimately transgressing such boundaries within the art world, Duchamp’s works reflected the artist’s sensibility. His use of irony, puns, alliteration, and paradox layered the works with humor while still enabling him to comment on the dominant political and economic systems of his time.
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23, Philadelphia Museum of Art), also known as The Large Glass, can be seen as summarizing Duchamp’s view that painting and sculpture were fundamentally incompatible and inadequate as art forms with which to render and reflect contemporary cultural life. His extensive preparatory drawings, writings, and studies for The Large Glass (many of which are contained in The Green Box of 1934) indicate his development away from realistic representations of forms to a more abstracted, mathematical mode of connoting the real world. His artistic evolution must therefore be understood as an assault on traditional artistic practices and a desire to accommodate a modern-day fascination with industrial processes and products.
Although in the 1920s, Duchamp famously renounced artmaking in favor of playing chess for the remainder of his life, he never fully retreated from his quintessential role as artist-provocateur. Duchamp is associated with many artistic movements, from Cubism to Dada to Surrealism, and paved the way for later styles such as Pop (Andy Warhol), Minimalism (Robert Morris), and Conceptualism (Sol LeWitt). A prolific artist, his greatest contribution to the history of art lies in his ability to question, admonish, critique, and playfully ridicule existing norms in order to transcend the status quo—he effectively sanctioned the role of the artist to do just that.
Nan Rosenthal
Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
October 2004
[4]
"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
Theory at the Millennium
by Thomas McEvilley
Everything we might say about an artwork that is not neutral description of aesthetic properties is an attribution of content. (Even value judgments, insofar as they reflect what Althusserian critics call "visual ideology, are implicit attributions of content.) If there is no such thing as neutral description, then all statements about art works involve attributions of content, whether acknowledged or not. There are many possible ways to sort these things out; one is on the model of geography—what types of content arise from this or that location in the artwork?
1. Content that arises from the aspect of the artwork that is understood as representational. This type of content is widely regarded as the least problematical; ironically, this very assumption lies at the heart of a tangled problem. We tend to feel that representation works by a recognizable element of objective resemblance, yet it seems more accurate to say that what we experience as representation is, like aesthetic taste, a culturally conditioned habit response not involving objective resemblance. In fact, it is difficult if not impossible to say what would constitute objective resemblance. And in reverse, the conviction of objective resemblance habituated in our pictorial tradition seems to exercise control over our perception of nature. The pictorial tradition, presented to us as representation of nature, has remade our perception of
nature to conform with the conventions of pictures (as Goodman and others have demonstrated in their critiques of representation and, especially, of the tradition of perspectival drawing). The resemblance we seem to see between pictures and nature does not result from the fact that art imitates nature, but from the fact that our perception of nature imitates our perception of art. Seen thusly, just as it seems we can't think anything that our language can't formulate, so it seems we can't see anything that our pictorial tradition does not include or imply.
Representation, then, especially two-dimensional representation, is not an objective imitation, but a conventional symbolic system which varies from culture to culture. What "looks like" nature to an Australian aborigine looks like symbols to us, and vice versa. Virtually every culture has a tradition of representation which it sincerely regards as based on resemblance. Faced with a painting of the Battle of Waterloo, we seem to recognize horses, weapons, warriors, and so on; what we are in fact recognizing are our conventional ways of representing horses, weapons, warriors, and so on. The fact that it is specifically the Battle of Waterloo must come from the next level of content.
2. Content arising from verbal supplements supplied by the artist. Duchamp's famous remark that the most important thing about a painting is its title points to a weakness in the "purely optical" theory of art. Artists frequently issue verbal supplements in an attempt to control the interpretation of their works, and even the most optical of critics cannot help but be influenced by them. In reference to a painting of horses, and weapons, and warriors, for example, the title "The Battle of Waterloo" injects a specific content arising not from optical features but from words. Abstract and reductionist art, as much as representational, has been dependent on content supplied in this way. For example, it would be virtually impossible (as Harold Rosenberg once remarked) to distinguish the Minimal from the Sublime without such verbal supplements as Barnett Newman's cabalistic titles, the published interviews with Frank Stella and Donald Judd, and so on. Robert Smithson's essays have controlled the interpretation of his works, as Yves Klein's essays have of his. This quality goes back, really, to the beginnings of art: to Pheidias' identification of a certain nude male sculpture as Zeus rather than, say, Poseidon or Apollo, to the texts accompanying Egyptian tomb paintings, to the shaman's explanatory song in front of his paintings. It is as important today as it ever was.
3. Content arising from the genre or medium of the artwork. This type of content shifts as ambient cultural forces shift. In the 1960s in America, for example, a contentual dichotomy between painting and sculpture arose. Painting came to imply a lack of direct involvement in experience, an absorption in indirect, distanced preoccupations. Sculpture, on the other hand, was understood, even when representational, as a real presence of objecthood, since it occupied the same space the viewer occupied, the space of embodied life. From this ethical dichotomy arose much of the dynamic of the art of the 1960s and 70s. The radical new genres were associated with sculpture, performance being called "living sculpture," installations "environmental sculpture," and so on. Painting was associated with the old values of convention, rather than actuality. For an artist to choose to work in oils on canvas was seen as a reactionary political statement—whereas in the 1950s oil and canvas has signified freedom, individuality, and existentialism. This dynamic was at the root of the great acceleration, in the 1960s and '70s, of the project of sculpturizing the painting, of asserting it as an object in real space rather than as a window into illusionistic space. Three-dimensional objects were added to canvases to link the representational surface to sculptural presence. Shaped canvases were similarly motivated. Explorations of ways to combine colors without producing a figure- ground relationship were another aspect of the effort to produce objects that, while recognizably paintings, were not compromised by suggestions of representation. The content inherent in the media and genres had attained political and cultural significance that asserted itself alongside the significance of the art objects themselves. History can provide countless examples of this type of content, not least the distinction between popular and elitist media (in ancient Greece, for example, the vase painting versus the sculpture) and that between male and female media (for example, in neolithic societies which restricted pottery-making and basket- making, that is, vessel-making in general, to women's groups).
4.Content arising from the material of which the artwork is made. Within the category of sculpture in the 1960s and '70s, an artist working marble representationally was at one level making a statement opposed to that of the artist working with industrial I-beams or fire. Traditional art materials, industrial materials, esoteric high-tech materials, absurdist materials (like Ed Ruscha's chocolate), neoprimitive materials (like Eric Orr's bone and blood), pantheistic materials (Klein's fire, and so on), deceptive self-disguising materials (plastic that looks like plaster, wood prepared to look like stone)—all these decisions by the artist carry content quite as much as form. They are judgment pronouncements that the art viewer picks up automatically without necessarily even thinking of them as content. They are statements of affiliation to, or alienation from, certain areas of cultural tradition; as, say, the use of industrial I-beams represents a celebration, or at least an acceptance, of urban industrial culture, while the use of marble or ceramic suggests nostalgia for the pre-Industrial Revolution world.
5. Content arising from the scale of the artwork. The New Kingdom Egyptian custom of sculpting pharaohs and their consorts much larger than life (as at Abu-Simbel) is an obvious assertion of political content, a portrayal of the hereditary monarchy and its representatives as awesomely given, like those parts of nature—sea, sky, desert, mountain—beside which ordinary human power and stature seem trivial. Such channels of content are not objective and absolute but culturally shifting: it is possible to conceive a society that would associate unusual smallness with special power or efficacy. In the Roman empire an emperor was sculpted during his lifetime about life-size; after death and deification, about twice life-size. Obviously, decisions of scale have formal significance; their contentual significances should be equally obvious. John Berger, among others, has pointed out that the portability of the easel painting was a signifier of private property. The increased scale of paintings from Barnett Newman onward suggests a more public arena—a society dominated by large institutions rather than by private individuals. The huge scale of many paintings today functions in part as a denial of transience through an implied reconstitution of the architectural support. Scale always has content, yet we read it so quickly that we hardly notice.
6. Content arising from the temporal duration of the artwork. The Platonist view that underlies the masterpiece tradition was stated by the Roman poet Seneca: "Vita brevis est, ars longa": life is short, art long. The artist's work, that is, was expected to outlive him or her. This hope went back at least to Sappho (6th century BC), who said that her poems would bring her immortality. The time-reality in which the artwork lived was not precisely historical time: its proper time dimension was a posterity conceived as a mingling of historical time and eternity—the artwork would survive through historical time forever, like Sappho's undying roses. With it something of the artist's Soul (its trace at least) also became immortal. In terms of Greek philosophy, the artwork has crossed a metaphysical boundary like that at the level of the moon, below which things die, above which, not. Great art, in other words, was regarded as having captured something of deity—as Quintilian said of Pheidias' Zeus. That divine spark inside the artwork is its immortal Soul, which enables it, like the magical ritual, to penetrate through to higher metaphysical realms and to act as a channel to conduct higher powers downward while yet keeping them pure. We are all familiar with this view. Even in comedies, artists seek immortality. One silly poet of the Roman Empire is survived only by a scrap of verse saying that his oeuvre would outlast the ages.
This view of artworks goes back to times when they were sanctified objects made for use in rituals. It is primitive magic plain and simple, which ritually abolishes historical time. It typified Egyptian tomb art, which portrayed the places and things of eternity and was itself magically equivalent to them; it goes back probably to those Magdalenian paintings in the distant depths of caves, beyond the reach of the changes of night and day. Yet despite the extreme primitiveness of its beginnings, this theory of art came into Romantic Europe whole, and has survived to the present day. Goethe quite as much as Propertius—and Dylan Thomas as much as Goethe—expected to be singing his poems in a chariot driven by the Muses toward Heaven.
Works with exaggeratedly durable materials—such as the granite in which the Egyptians carved pharaohs—participate in this Platonic daydream of transcending the web of cause and effect here below. The idea, of course, is integral to the formalist Modern tradition, which is throughout solidly founded on primitive thoughts and intentions. It is why the artwork is held to have no relation to socio-economic affairs: it has transcended conditionality and, by capturing a spark of the divine, has become an ultimate. Signs of this metaphysic virtually ooze from the works made on its assumption, which can be detected not only by the durability of their materials but also by the pomposity that surrounds their aesthetic displays.
Just as clearly, an opposite metaphysic is asserted by works made in deliberately ephemeral modes or materials—a metaphysic affirming flux and process and the changing sense of selfhood. The obsessive expectation of posterity is linked with the belief in Soul and constitutes, in effect, a claim that one has a Soul. Works affirming flux involve the opposite assumption, that the self is a transient situation arising from the web of conditions and subject to its changes.
7. Content arising from the context of the work. When the work leaves the artist's studio, what route does it take into what part of the world? This decision always has political content. Mail Art and other strategies to bypass the channels of commodification are expressions of resistance to the processes of commodity fetishism and are gestures toward the abandonment of exchange value and the regaining of use value. Other kinds of content cling to specific contextual situations. The release of a commodifiable aesthetic object into the marketing network often carries with it an opposite burden of content. It wants to be bought, and like anything that wants to be bought its attempts to ingratiate itself with prospective buyers are obvious, no matter that it may have been made by a monument of integrity such as Jackson Pollock. These are things that one must cock one's head slightly differently to see—and then at once they become obvious. All art is site-specific to that degree. Declaredly site-specific art involves selection of context as a major contentual statement: Is the work protected apart in a distant fenced compound of the New Mexico desert? Or is it thrown down in one section or another of an urban downtown? The contentual aspects of such decisions are as important as their formal aspects are.
8. Content arising from the work's relationship with art history. When the historicist drive is greatly exacerbated, as at the height of the Greenberg era, there is also a mythic-millennialist content which carries with it a weight of German metaphysics and residual Neo-Platonic spirituality. The myth of the evolution toward the innocent Eye suggests a drive toward the paradise at the End of History. The opposite of this complete affirmation of art history as a cosmic-spiritual directionality is an iconoclastic approach, sometimes expressed in deliberate primitivism. Yet in a sense this type of movement is an attempt to roll back the tradition of vision to the earlier phase of innocence, the paradise before history. These two movements, though opposite, complement one another.
The most common mode of content arising from the work's relationship to art history is in the use of allusions and quotations to assert a special relationship with some other work or tradition of works. James McNeill Whistler's introductions of references to Japanese painting and the Cubist references to African art are examples of such content, commenting, in both cases, on the closedness of the Western tradition and suggesting alternative aesthetic codes beyond it. Lately, the most common type of allusion has been to earlier works in one's own tradition. This level of content is so important to our present moment that I will discuss it in detail later.
9. Content that accrues to the work as it progressively reveals its destiny through persisting in time. I mean here much what Walter Benjamin meant when he said that a man who died at age 30 would forever after be regarded as a man who, at whatever stage of his life, would die at age 30. Whatever occurs to a work as its history unfolds becomes part of the experience of the work, and part of its meaning, for later generations. Duchamp added content to the Mona Lisa; Tony Shafrazi to Guernica, and what's-his-name to Michelangelo's Saint Peter's Pieta. The fact that Greenberg used Pollock's works as proofs of the idea of contentless painting is now part of the content of those paintings.
10. Content arising from participation in a specific iconographic tradition. Iconography is a conventional mode of representing without the supposition that natural resemblance is involved. Thus to Christians blue may be felt as Mary's color without a suggestion that it looks like Mary. Through iconographic conventions, identifications and comments are made through conventional signals. A Christian, for example, sees not a human woman talking to a birdwinged man, but the Annunciation. To a Hindu a crowned man on a bird is Vishnu and Garuda, with all the myths and feelings associated with them called instantly into play. At less conscious levels are iconographic messages in movies, from the white and black hats in early Westerns to, say, clothing semiotics in Scarface. Context signals us toward one response or another: for example, the ringing telephone in a love film may signal an assignation, while in a gangster film a contract for assassination.
Whether some widely-distributed iconographic conventions are based on innate psychological foundations, such as Jungian archetypes, is an unanswerable question, but it is clear that inherited conventions of this type saturate our responses and are effective in a hidden way in many artworks. One critical approach to 20th-century art that has been very little used, yet is remarkably fruitful, is to subject it to interpretation in terms of the iconographic stream that goes back in both East and West, to the ancient Near East and beyond. Willem de Kooning's "Women," for example, may profitably be compared with goddess- representations from Hindu Kali to Egyptian Isis to the leopard goddess of Catal Huvuk.
11. Content arising directly from the formal properties of the work. The formalist idea that abstract art lacks content is rightly seen today as archaic. It seems the associative and conceptualizing activities of the human mind go on constantly and transpire in an instant. Thus we see everything within some frame of meaning. If perceptions truly had no content whatsoever they would be blank moments in consciousness and would leave no trace in memory. At one level, formal configurations function as ontological propositions. Merely by shaping energy one models the real; every grasping or shaping is a rhetorical persuasion for a view of reality. Critics commonly have asserted that music has no content. But, for example, Beethoven is widely experienced as presenting a view of reality as stormy, turbulent, and full of passionate striving, while Bach presents it as serene, cool hyper-realms of sensuous mathematical order. A Pollock drip painting asserts flux and indefiniteness of identity as qualities that can be found in the world. This tautological interface between form and content is not a mystical attempt to unify opposites. It simply means that a work demonstrates a type of reality by embodying it. Thus abstract art, far from being non- representational, is, in effect, a representation of concepts; it is based on a process like that of metaphor, and overlaps somewhat with both iconography and representation.
This level of content is involved in value judgments, since it relates especially closely to the content of visual ideology (though visual ideology arises from all levels of content at once); hence, it confuses aesthetic issues somewhat. The assertion by Althussierian critics that aesthetic feeling is merely and exclusively a response to visual ideology is based on the Lacanian model of how the self constitutes itself from the surrounding cultural codes and then, looking at these codes again, seems to recognize itself in them. Whether a purely aesthetic level of response can ever be isolated from the encroachment of this process is a major question in art today.
12.Content arising from attitudinal gestures (wit, irony, parody, and so on) that may appear as qualifiers of any of the categories already mentioned. This level of content usually involves a judgment about the artist's intentions. The desire to persuade, for example, is a form of intentionality that saturates some works and involves itself in all their effects John Keats referred to such a situation when he wrote, "We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us." Our word "propaganda" means much the same. In irony, wit, and so on, some level of content is presented by the artist with indications that his or her attitude toward it is not direct and asseverative but indirect and perverse. The process is complex. The viewer's mind compares the statement received with another hypothetical statement which the mind constructs as representing the normal or direct version, and by contrast with which the abnormal and indirect approach can be perceived and measured Thus ironic indirection, entering into any other category of content, criticizes that content at the same time it states it, and alters the charge of meaning.
13. Content rooted in biological or physiological responses, or in cognitive awareness of them. Various claims have been made about types of communication that operate on a purely physiological level. (In fact, formalism, with its "purely optical" trend, was a claim of this type, while with its "faculty of taste" it introduced a supernatural ally to the optic nerve.) Sebastiano Timpanaro and others have suggested that some types of subject matter, such as sex and death, appeal to us because we know that we are organisms subject to death and involved in sexual reproduction; these responses, then, are prior to socio- economic acculturation. Contentual readings that may be closer to pure physiological responses would include the stirring of the genitals in response to pictures of sexual subjects, the phenomenon of fainting at the sight of blood, or of becoming nauseous from viewing gory pictures; and so on. This is the level of content that is often denounced as "sensationalism"—sex and violence—with the denunciation presumably based on a sense of how easy it is to construct images that will elicit such responses. Some psychological research has suggested innate responses to colors, blue for example (perhaps contrary to popular notions) arousing feelings of aggression and pink of peacefulness. (There is an odd parody here of what the formalists sometimes called the "feeling" of color.)
Perhaps the psychoanalytic content associated with the theories of D.W. Winnicott belongs in this category, on the grounds that it arises from memories of primordial phases in the development of the organism. In relation to painting, Winnicott's work suggests (not for the first time) an equation between the figure- ground relationship on the one hand and the ego-world relationship on the other. Work that emphasizes the ground, or an ambiguous condition in which figure is almost completely merged into ground, expresses the ego's desire to dissolve itself into a more generalized type of being, on the remembered model of the infant's sleep on its mother's breast. Work that emphasizes figure, or clear separation of figure and ground, expresses a sense of ego-clarity, and a fear of ego-loss or of the loss of the clear boundaries between ego and world. (In more traditional terms, these are, respectively, the Dionysian and the Apollonian.) All artworks, I think (perhaps all human actions of any type), express an attitude on this question, no matter what else they express. In some cases this question is brought into the foreground as a primary artistic content; Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, Agnes Martin, and others have all portrayed the moment when ego begins to differentiate itself for the dual-unity (as Geza Roheim called it) with the mother's body. These artists saw in their own work a metaphysical moment that is a correlate of this psychoanalytic moment: the subject of "Creation," "Beginning," "Day One," "The Deep," and so on—the first emergence of differentiated things from the primal abyss of potentiality (compare Winnicott's term "potential space," which also correlates metaphysically with prime matter). Seen in these metaphysical terms this content can also be placed in the category of content arising from the formal properties of the work by a process like that of metaphor.
This list of thirteen categories is like a series of sample sightings of some great beast (Meaning) whose behavior is too complex to be fully formulated. As long as we chose to look for different ways to sort these things out we would find them. The categories I have presented overlap and interpenetrate at various places. (It would be foolish to expect a crisp set of categories from an activity of mammals.) Furthermore, as long as we choose to look for more ways in which the mind reads meaning out of an artwork, we would find them, too. Each possible network of relations between categories is itself another means of conveying a precise, if complex, content, and the possible networks and meta-networks of relations among the thirteen listed above proceed toward infinity.
The relation between content arising from representation and content arising from formal properties is a prominent example of this type of interaction. To show Wellington at Waterloo with Goyaesque grotesquerie, or with expressionistically fraying edges denying the integrity of ego, would add to the subject matter a thematic content involving denial of heroic integrity, or some such. Similarly, grandiosity of scale can conflict with triviality of subject matter, as in much Pop art. Indeed, conflicts between all levels can occur, and in infinite regresses of complexity which cannot be individually defined here. A work that features contradictions among its levels of content thereby gains yet another level involving concepts like paradox, inner struggle, tension, and negation of meaning-processes.
On the other hand, works that exhibit a high degree of harmony or mutual confirmation among the various levels of content tacitly model the real as integrated, whole, and rich in meaning, somewhat in the manner of the traditional masterpiece.
Not all works, of course, have all levels of content. Abstract art, for example, has eliminated naive realist representationalism. The number of levels that are in fact discernibly present (or absent) provides us with yet another level of content. Works in both the Minimalist and the Sublime directions, for example, exhibit an attempt to eliminate content or at least to reduce the number of contentual levels present in the work. This attempt in itself declares or acts out a new level of content; no work ever attains the zero degree of content, since the concept of a zero-degree of content is itself a content. In combination with other levels (primarily verbal supplements by the artist) this content may express the Minimalist ethic, or the Sublimist, or an impersonalist ethic, as in much International-style architecture. In 20th-century painting this anti-contentual content has been of enormous importance. From Malevich to Klein to Newman, attempts were made to represent concepts like void, emptiness, prime matter, and the absolute by plastic analogues of the characteristics of solitary grandeur, nondifferentiation, and potentiality. In contrast, works of the traditional masterpiece type—from the Sistine ceiling to Guernica—tend to articulate as many levels of content as possible in their portrayal of a full-bodied sense of rich, meaningful involvement in life.
This list of contents that arise among categories could be extended indefinitely. What is essential is that we begin to appreciate the complexity of what we do when we relate to an artwork. Far from being a "purely optical" and unmediated reflex, the art event is an infinitely complex semiotic Bead Game involving many different levels and directions of meaning, and infinite regresses of relations among them. Let's forget for a moment the Eye of the Soul and think of the marvelous mammalian brain which instantly reads out these many different codes, keeps them separate while balancing and relating them, and produces a sense of the work in which all these factors are represented, however transformed through interplay with the particular receiving sensibility. Far from a simplistic philistinism, content is a complex and demanding event without which no artwork could transpire. It demands our attention since without awareness of these distinctions and levels we do not really know what has happened already in art, and what is happening now for the first time.
[5]
"On The Manner Of Addressing Clouds"
Theory at the Millennium
Theory at the Millennium
by Thomas McEvilley
Two thousand five hundred years ago the form/content relationship was a heated philosophical question. Plato thought that content didn’t matter at all: form, he said really exists by itself, triumphant in it’s isolation, crystalline as a dawn of light that will never be stained by the heat of a morning. Aristotle, after twenty years in Plato’s school, still had a nagging suspicion that the doctrine of pure Form was a priestly trick of some kind. (Hadn’t Plato learned it, after all, from the priests at Heliopolis in Egypt?) It is said that Aristotle in his own school later, would forego the quest for pure Form and have his students crawling around in the dirt of the garden, classifying types of cabbages.
Plato’s establishment was not, officially, a school. it was tax-exempt as a temple to the Muses, the Goddesses of Art, to whom inside, pure Form was offered as an object of worship. Aristotle was perplexed by this. The crux came when, after years of waiting, he and the other advanced students were told that at last they would hear Plato’s legendary lecture on The Good. Anticipation was keen; the day arrived. But cabbage-brained Aristotle again emerged perplexed. This much he tells us: All Plato talked about that day was triangles and squares: It was a geometry lesson! The Good was pure Form! Some of the students emerged in Pythagorean rapture. But Aristotle wanted to know: How do you see pure Form? If it is really without content, then it must be transparent, which is to say, invisible. And the master’s answer is there, in the seventh book of the Republic, where Plato hesitates so long before pulling down the veil before the sanctum sanctorum: We see pure Form, he declares, with the Eye of the Soul! Aristotle, like Descartes later, wondered: Where is that Eye! (In the pineal gland, maybe?) Anayway, when Plato died, he didn’t make Aristotle the head of his school, but his cousin, who also had the Eye. Aristotle, perplexed and annoyed, founded his own school and invented natural science. He reasoned that form could only be known through its content, content only through its form. Tit for tat. Yin for yang. This just seemed like plain speaking. Such pairs of dependent terms, like left and right or yes and no, only have meaning in relation to one another and as different from one another. An attempt to split them apart and suppress one, as in Manichaean-type dualisms, can be a communal psychological tragedy - as in the Yahwehistic worship of Father without Mother, Sky without Earth, and so on. But the opposite attempt - the monistic strategy of declaring the two (for example, form and content) to be the same - simply renders the terms meaningless and abandons them as tools. As soon as one pays attention to how the words work, both pure Form and the Oneness of Form and Content disappear into an invisibility not of transcendence but of linguistic non-meaning. They go where mistakes in grammar go. They go where the vehicles of metaphors go. They retreat into the Bronze Age of myth-talk from whence they emerged, to drift with Amon-Re like mists above the deep.
By the 18th century Plato was finally on the run; the Soul was a laughing stock. The idea of the integral self began to be balanced by the attention to the quasi-mechanical aspects of selfhood. The doctrine of the Soul had always been an argument for unchanging totalitarian statehood - from Old Kingdom Egypt to the aristocrat Plato to the doctrine of the divine rights of kings in 18th-century Europe: unchanging soul and the unchanging State were both expressions of the ideal Order, and both would fall together. David Hume, searching for an unifying principle of self, pried his own thoughts apart and saw that there was nothing in between them; thoughts chased one another through his mind as mechanically as billiard balls, with no unifying principle connecting them. After the tyranny of Soulism, anti-Soulism was experienced as freedom. David Hartley , like a modern behaviorist, reduced human motivations to mechanical processes of habit-formation. Julien La Mettrie wrote Man the Machine (1748). Soul was routed, and the dynasties of Europe fell. But Soulism did not simply disappear; it crept into a sheltered retreat like Plato’s tax-exempt Temple of the Muses: it crept into art theory and hid there. From the Cambridge Platonists to the Earl of Shaftesbury to Immanuel Kant to Clement Greenberg, it would now be called: the faculty of taste. Behind this new, antiseptic name lurks Plato’s Eye of the Soul, and behind that the Udja-Eye of the Old Kingdom Egypt, the Eye of Horus, that sees the Things of Heaven. But only, Plato pointed out, for one who has specially cleansed that orb, which in most of us remains filthy and dim. And how do you know that someone’s Eye is clean? There’s no way to check it.
This Soulism in art theory was soon joined by an equally myth-based view of history which became the foundation of the formalist evolutionary view of art: that history is driving toward this or that end, and that past events could only have happened as they did. As a disguised assertion of religious Providence, it justifies the establishment of tyrannical authority-structures that claim to express the inner imperative of history. Friedrich Schelling and Georg Hegel, Impressed as youths with the ineluctable appearance of the advance of Napoleon, revived the religious myth that history is advancing toward a final perfection in which Spirit, cleansed of the illusion of Matter, will be totally absorbed in itself. Further, Schelling elevated the aesthetic faculty above the other two postulated by Kant, the cognitive and the practical: Spirit expressed itself through Art, which was, as Hegel said, “the sensuous appearance of the absolute.” Art-making , then, became the most crucial and urgent of all human activities: by driving art history along the path of formalist evolution toward the goal of pure Spirit/Form, the artist actually hastens (as by a kind of sympathetic magic) the advance of the Universal Spirit toward perfection. (according to this view the self-absorbed rapture of Spirit, at the orgasmic End of History would be a kind of universal art event) This myth, which lays upon art the terrifying responsibility of perfecting Spirit, exerted an unhealthy influence on artists and poets, who, in earlier cultures, had not been noticeably more tortured, alcoholic, or suicidal than other small producers or artisans.
In this century, we have seen pendulum swings away from the worship of pure Form in various movements that have explicitly rejected the primacy of formalist esthetic values. The basis of the rejection was stated by Marcel Duchamp when, in reply to Pierre Cabanne’s question “what is taste?”, he replied, “Habit”. In an age that has seen that language systems are conditioned, such an insight was inevitable. Canons of taste, as seen by ethnology and philosophy, must be regarded not as eternal cosmic principles, but as transient cultural habit-formations. The elements praised by formalist critics have specific coded values in their habit-systems. For some one to have “better” taste than others, then is for that person to sense and exercise the communal habit-system with unusual attention and sensitivity. The exercise of one’s esthetic habit-system on artworks exquisitely expressive of that same system produces a pleasant sense of recognition, identification, and confirmation. The shape of the esthetic habit will change as the web of conditions that contains it changes. Yet only the present habit ever seems real - as the smoking habit is real to one who has it and strangely unimaginable to one who does not. One rarely remembers changing one’s taste - yet the history of the changes is there. This is why there is always more formalist work for artists to do: reshaping the aesthetic habit-system for the needs of a new now. Understood in this way, seeing with the Udja-Eye of keen aesthetic habit is tragically far from the experience of transcendentally free vision that its proponents have hoped it might be. In fact, it is the opposite: a bondage, a limitation, a groundless prejudice imposed by ambient conditions. Specific habit-systems are defended with actually religious zeal, and to be mistaken has , to the believer, the monstrous import of a religious mistake: it is no less than an indictment of one’s Soul.
The literature of formalist criticism contains, throughout, the odd blindnesses and repressions typical of religious texts, including a system of taboos. One such is an example of euphemia- the obligation to speak only propitious things while acting in a priestly capacity. To study content, the formalists seem to feel, would be like studying the Devil rather than God. Content, as Susan Sontag wrote, was a kind of “philistinism.” To ignore it highmindedly was, then a sign of virtue, a sign, really, that one ws among the elect. Even to look at the question of content would be to submit oneself to a degrading invitation. This puritanical avoidance of the question has become institutionalized. But the age of the formalists’ creative blindness - the age of their great insights into the Modernist aesthetic habit - is long gone, and the question of content remains. There are those who have made inroads into it from various directions - Walter Benjamin and Louis Althusser, Harold Rosenberg, and Nicolas Calas (to name some important examples) - and those who have significantly clarified the question - Erwin Panofsky and E.H. Gombrich, the philosophers Nelson Goodman and Timothy Binkley - but the simple question has never yet been directly asked and directly answered: What is content, anyway? And, are we involved?
