Obviously talk about art could be a
valuable interest adding exercise if the discourse was straight forward, easy
to grasp and promoted a vocabulary that allowed us the ability to use what we have gleaned from our previous experiences
with art to extend our understanding.
The object is to provide shared experiences based on a
point of
reference that all would understand.
Aesthetics does not seem to offer us such a means. As George Dickey points out “The attempt to discover a core
for aesthetics is an attempt to provide stability and organization for what is
by common agreement an untidy discipline.” Dickey,
George, Aesthetics, Pegasus,
Indianapolis, (1971) pp 109
Referring
back to Carroll’s claim concerning statues that - “…it is immensely implausible
to suppose that these works are designed with any intention to exhibit
significant form.” – we can say without hesitation that their form is
significant in that they share three aspects with all other art works though
they have different constituent parts.
The medium of a statue may be bronze or nickel or it may be carved in
wood or made from welded pieces of metal.
A cast statue would require a mold to be made from a likeness in wood,
plaster, clay or wax which would be part of the manner of presentation. Most often the subject matter of a statue
will be clear if it is not an abstract piece.
By attending to form we are able to show how newer (and perhaps outlandish)
art works maintain continuity with past artworks. Those who are concerned that there should be
consideration for how an artwork relates to its predecessors need only to
recognize the form of the work. The
understanding of form as I have presented it in part 1 avoids the difficulties
philosophers conjure up when discussing what they call first art and mid-life
art. Stephen Davies puts the argument
this way:
First art should be distinguished from two things with which it
could be confused: (a) it must be distinct from the progenitors from which it
sprang. The first art-making practices
probably arose from others with which they were historically and culturally
continuous, rather than appearing from thin air, but these other practices
could not have been art-making ones, whatever similarities they shared with
those generating first art. (b) First art should be distinguished from mid-
life art. Items that were not art when
they were created might have art status conferred on them retrospectively. That is, from the perspective of an art
tradition established long after the creation of certain pieces, we might
decide that those pieces merit art status and treat them accordingly. Stephen
Davies, Philosophical Perspectives on
Art, Oxford University Press, (2007) pp 69
We have to remember that
Davies is an aesthetician. Works that
cannot be said to have aesthetic properties cannot be art, first or
otherwise. Scratch marks on a cave wall
cannot be said to be primitive art. They are not art because they lack the form
we identify as art. (We will discuss
this further in a later post.) Scratch marks on a cave wall would be one of the
progenitors of first art that Davies speaks of.
But hand prints on a cave wall do, however, have form as art and while
they may fail the aesthetician’s requirements in that they lack aesthetic
properties they are unquestionably works of art. The hand print has a medium (usually ochre
using saliva as a binder). It has a
manner of presentation (blown from the mouth or tube over the hand onto a cave
wall that enhances its appearance) and an obvious subject matter. The hand print qualifies as first art. A number of caves show a series of fist size
dots in different colors and in rows which were either brushed or blown onto
the ceilings. Because their medium and subject matter are indistinguishable
they also fail to qualify as first art.
It is clear from Davies’
argument that he sees mid-life art as something that has merit conferred upon
it when he states “…we might decide that those pieces merit art status and
treat them accordingly.’ What Davies is
thinking about here is something like African
Bakongo
Nkisi Nail fetish statues from the
Congo (Figure 9.) whereby
nails are driven into a carved wooden doll.
In some tribes they have been used to settle disputes and in others they
are used to seek a spirit’s protection.
Several Art Museums have acquired these dolls displaying them as
artworks though they were never intended as such. Consequently Davies calls them mid-life art;
objects that didn’t start out as art but became art once their aesthetic
qualities were recognized.
Actually,
recognition is not an aesthetician’s preferred description. Rather, conferred as art is how many
aestheticians promote the activity. The
reason being is that we cannot recognize mid-life art unless we have a concept
that we apply to it. But it seems we can
look at an artifact and describe it in aesthetic terms thereby conferring art
on it without being able to describe a concept of art.
As
Davies’ concept of art involves meritorious accomplishment there can be no such
thing as bad art. If a work has no discernible aesthetic properties it cannot be called art. Davies description of mid-life art demonstrates
David Lewis-Williams’ claim that an aesthetic sense comes after the appearance
of art which demonstrates the two uses of the term ‘art’. For Davies the term art is evaluative
(meritorious) whereas for Lewis-Williams it is classificatory (belonging to a
class of objects regardless of merit).
What this means for Lewis-Williams is that a work of art need not have
any aesthetic properties. By the same
token it is quite possible that a work will have meritorious (aesthetic)
elements but lack integrity as a work of art though Davies may find such a
situation disconcerting. Unfortunately
there are artists today that seek to create aesthetic works without
consideration of form. Fantasy art where
subject matter and technique overwhelms medium and manner of presentation is a
case in point.
Noël
Carroll comes closest to an understanding of form when he discusses Artistic
Form but his thesis is contaminated by his previous discussion of the
neoformalist’s form/content argument. Carroll proposes: “Perhaps the most
common way of thinking of artistic form is to conceive of it as one half of a
distinction – the distinction between form and content.”(137) He discusses the many items that may make up
a painting and confronts a dilemma. “The
problem is that, at various times and in various contexts, any of these things
or combinations thereof can be and have been identified as the content of such
paintings. But that renders the
distinction between form and content unstable.” (138)
As it has been shown, form is constituted
by recognizing that it has three aspects that allow us to distinguish how the
different parts of an art work contribute to the whole. Carroll confuses form with shape and is stuck
with a form/content dilemma and seems unable extract himself.
Wisely Carroll forgoes
the attempt to describe artistic form by linking it with content. Artistic form, he decides is composed of
unified parts. “Parts and relations then
are the basic ingredients of artistic form.”(140) Carroll is close but he doesn’t get a
cigar. He fails to understand that
Artistic form is a factor in all art works.
He misses the forest for the trees.
Recognizing that he is unable to offer a definition of art that will
provide us with a concept of art he asks: “If we were possessed of such a
definition, why would it be so difficult to extract?”(266) My view is that aesthetics gets in the way
but Carroll has asked the necessary question.
Why would we wish to call a work
‘art’ in any sense of the term when an art form is absent? No doubt such a question plagued the
organizers of the New York art show in 1917 when they received a submission
from Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp purchased a
urinal from a plumbing supply store titled it ‘Fountain’ and signed it R. Mutt and submitted it in the open
sculpture section.
It
caused uproar in the art world, was refused entry and mysteriously
disappeared. Duchamp subsequently remade
the work for several galleries. Since, it has become clear that ‘Fountain’ is not only a clear demonstration of its art form; it has
proved to be the flag ship of a major movement in art. Of course there are
still some scholars who insist that it should be placed in a subspecies of
non-serious art such as Amusement Art.
Duchamp's Fountain (Copy 1964)
There is a long joke that has circulated
among artist concerning the painter Pablo Picasso. It seems he was sought out by an admirer who
had inherited an unsigned painting and the admirer’s deceased ancestor had insisted
he had watched Picasso paint the work.
When the earnest admirer confronted Picasso with the painting to ensure
its authenticity Picasso gave it a quick glance and
declared it to be junk. The admirer
protested and informed Picasso that his deceased ancestor had actually watched
him paint the work to which Picasso replied “I paint a lot of junk!”
The point of this abbreviated story is to
bring to the fore the understanding that very accomplished artists make a lot
of works that are not exemplary. After
all artists are not superhuman beings, they sometimes, unknowingly, make
mistakes, misjudgments and careless works much the same as those of us who are
not artists. Of course they do not have to display works they think are
lacking. But how are we to describe such
works? An equally probing question would
be “Can a work be appreciated as an aesthetic piece and yet not be an exemplary
work?” Some aestheticians would offer a
flat ‘no’ to the question. If we accept
the thesis that the perception of an aesthetic quality is the defining condition
for a work of art, we are still left without an understanding of a concept of
art. We are obliged to accept the
possibility that the perception of an aesthetic quality is not fundamental to
describing a work as art. This would
mean that we could have works of art in which no aesthetic quality was
perceived. While aestheticians may well
consider such a state of affairs tantamount to heresy the statement is,
nevertheless, in some sense true. Some may wish to argue that a work that
provides the opportunity for the creative act has by definition an aesthetic
quality but then they would have to abandon a number of their aesthetic
principles.
The
concept ‘form’ has been in public usage for over two thousand years. Plato is perhaps the first philosopher to
establish the concept’s credentials.
Commonly, English writers translate Plato’s use of the term to mean
‘idea’ but the Greek sense of the word included how a thing looks. In Latin documents we find the word ‘species’
substituting for the term ‘form’ and we extrapolate the term form to be ‘a kind
of thing’. This is surely what is meant
when we use the term ‘art form’. Our art
forms are categories that contain things of a kind some of which are exemplary
works while others are merely examples of the form.
To be continued…
Launt Thompson
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