What is the ‘function’ of works we wish to call ‘art’? It has been my experience that nearly everyone who actively involves themselves in one or more of our many art forms has a well formed answer to the above question. Responses vary from “The function of art is to provide us with opportunities to reflect on some aspect of our or another’s society.” or “The function of art is to be pleasing.” to “The function of art is to serve human’s innate desire to create.” (Some of you may wish to extend or change the wording in these examples to suit your own view.) No doubt, most of us recognize that all of the above may be demonstrated by some works, but what may not be obvious is that by holding such views we are committing ourselves to setting the defining criteria for what is to count as a work of art.
There is an elephant in an Arizona Zoo (USA) which regularly appears before the public with its keeper, selects a brush with its trunk, chooses a colour from various dabs of paint on a palette and proceeds to brush colour onto a prepared canvas. The process is repeated until a number of multi-coloured (dare I say) paintings are produced. The zoo has placed many of these works on sale and the average price is $600 (US). It may or may not be surprising to discover that the elephant is finding it taxing to keep up with the demand for these works. I most certainly would buy one should I have the opportunity and I suspect we will see more zoo and circus entrepreneurs following suit once the genre has gained respectability. But why stop with elephants when monkeys, brush tailed possums and spitting llamas are also candidates for exploitation?
Blue Flowers by 8 year old elephant Wanpen
While many would purchase such works because they were a pleasing novelty my desire to purchase is mischievously motivated. I own a number of what may be called abstract paintings and such a work would be a fitting addition for it would allow me to test the conviction of those who hold views similar to those above. I could, for instance, ask visitors to compare it to a work by a local artist which is often read as ‘a blood scared seal on an ice flow’ or a crow as road kill.
The elephant piece would be described as pleasing but the latter has never received such praise. Is one a candidate for a description as art and the other not merely because it does not (in the first instance) fulfill its function? The elephant piece most surely does not serve ‘human’s innate desire to create’. And we would not need to see such paintings to suggest that they provided ‘opportunities to reflect on some aspect of our or another’s culture’. A verbal description would suffice for this activity and the paintings need never be shown. And I am sure that some visitors would not be pleased to discover, after attentive analysis, that they had been duped by an elephant. Can such pieces be disqualified as art on these grounds alone? Might it be more probable that what has been described as the various ‘functions’ of art are not functions at all?
Kenneth Hudson describes ‘function’ as “One of the three most loved words of today’s industrial world.”[1] He suggests that the term ‘function’ has been endowed with a ‘clown-like versatility’ which has served to promote much verbal nonsense which is a disease of those “...people with nothing to say, but with a powerful vested interest in saying it impressively.”[2] Consequently academics, politicians, lawyers, management writers, theologians and critics of all kinds tend to spread the disease to the populace.
While Function Theory and Functional Analysis are most often the domain of Mathematics, Logic, Sociology and Anthropology (and much disputed in these disciplines), I think few would deem it incorrect usage to argue that ‘the ‘function’ of the beating heart is to circulate blood’. And I might add (to prepare the ground for a point to be investigated later) it would seem unusual, indeed, to argue that the ‘purpose’ of the beating heart is to circulate blood. We might wish to add that the ‘function’ of circulating blood is to preserve the body, particularly the brain, keeping it alive so that it may send messages such as those that stimulate the heart to beat.
There are two points to be made about this explanation: 1.) whatever it is that can be said to be a function, ‘functions within a system’ and 2.) “Further, if such statements of “function” are to do more than merely describe consequences, it should be possible to show that the alleged function also reinforces the practice of the activity.”[3] Dorothy Emmet warns us that sociologists tend toward teleological implications (if indirectly) when discussing ‘function’ by relating it to the values, interests or purposes of persons or groups for it is by these means that a society is self-sustaining. Given that the notion of function is related in some way to value even when discussing a beating heart (we value living organs and discard the dead, however reverently), we must ask: ‘How may we describe the function of those works we wish to call art?’ and equally: ‘Is it the case that works of art participate in a reinforcing system of art or are they merely objects labelled ‘art’ which, for various reasons, participate in a much larger social system?’
Though sociologists may wish to respond in the affirmative to the latter question, there are a number of problems with such a stance. Whatever values we attribute to art, we would be hard put to show such values were a sufficient reinforcement to promote society, however necessary we hold them to be. Society could get on very nicely without art for such values could be attained in other ways. To argue otherwise would be to argue from a tautology. This becomes even more problematic should we argue that the value of works is not something contained within them as a quality but is an investiture of some sort by persons. In other words, art does not come about by discovery, within them, of values we believe we should hold dear but by proclamation (which is again, tautological). Though I can easily live with the idea that many works of art are meaningless, I cannot hold that they have no function. The notion I am trying to refute is that works of art function to serve society’s goals. Consequently I am forced to hold the view that works of art participate in a self-reinforcing system. The function of works of art is to serve the system in which they participate. We have and preserve works of art ‘for art’s sake’. Before I propose how works of art can be said to function in a system that is self- reinforcing I would like to look at the notion of ‘purpose’.
There is a persistent view that works of art provide us with opportunities to reflect on society and while in some instances this might be shown to be true (the notion may be a mistaken description of the state of affairs), I think it is clear from the above argument that such opportunities cannot be construed as the function of such works. Most of us will admit that regardless of how the work comes about ( by an elephant’s trunk or by a human hand) a work of art is a contrivance and does not lay claim to being a documentation of historical fact.[4] In other words, Picasso’s Guernica is not a factual depiction (unlike, say, a photograph) of the bombing of the Spanish town which bears that name. Indeed, it is a deliberate contrivance of an imagined event (but not an imaginary event for the bombing of Guernica did take place). While a discussion of the painting may draw us into a discussion of the actual bombing, the actual bombing will tell us nothing about the painting nor will the painting tell us anything about the actual bombing. A discussion of one event is outside the realm of a discussion of the other. In other words, if the town of Guernica never existed, Picasso’s painting would lose none of its inherent values. Indeed, even if such a thing as war only existed in the minds of novelist and film makers, the painting would still contain its values. No doubt our ability to understand art relies on an inter-related set of concepts and ideas but they need not have as a referent something that exists. I am sure both you and I can distinguish between a good representation of a unicorn, a poor one and a mistaken one.
Of course, those who hold that art must stimulate our social awareness or conscience could not brook such an argument for they would not be prepared to admit that works of art have inherent values that may be more worthwhile than the service they offer society or that works of art may offer no service to society. In other words, art must have a ‘purpose’ that can be either imputed or documented. For obvious reasons such things as elephant art pose problems for such a stance which is why the term ‘function’ is often the patsy for the term ‘purpose’, allowing doctrine to maintain supremacy over practice.
Purpose or purposiveness is a concept that is very much related to conscious goals or objectives. Consequently it is an activity of thinking beings. While we may, in many ways, use inanimate objects with purpose, the objects themselves are passive participants. They are not aware of the purposes that their application serves. The stage set is not aware that it masks the walls of the theatre and provides the environment for the play. The costumes cannot revel in their contribution to our understanding of character. The painting, Guernica , knows nothing of war (or art for that matter). The point is, when we attribute ‘purpose’ to works of art we are describing either the maker of art or the spectator and it would not be unusual to discover that each has a different understanding of the ‘purpose’ of a particular work. In other words, a work may be valued as art even though it does not serve the ‘purpose’ of the maker or the spectator (Brecht’s Mother Courage will serve as an example of the former and Duchamp’s Fountain for the latter). Too often the ‘purpose’ of the maker and/or the spectator serves to subvert the potential values of a work for an identifiable purpose (as opposed to imputed purpose) tends to undermine the pursuit and/or recognition of function. Brecht’s didactic plays are poor examples of theatre, Hugo’s political plays are seldom if ever performed, it is difficult to appreciate English Passion Plays for their inherent artistic values and pornography will never be raised to the stature of art until it offers us something superior to the incitement of our prurient interests.
The often stated dictum that artists do not paint (or write, direct and act) what they see, rather, they see what they paint (or write, direct and act) reminds us that an identifiable purpose often plays a non-significant role in the creation of art. Indeed, ‘purpose’ is often something of an after-thought to the making of art serving the publicizing of the work. In such cases the purpose is not so much readily identifiable as imputed (Arthur Miller’s The Crucible for example). While my purpose for seeking out elephant art serves my philosophical understanding, such an understanding would be thwarted should such a work have no inherent values toward which I could point. Of course those who hold attitudes spawned by G. V. Plekhanov’s defence of ‘historical materialism’[5] are often discovered stretching credulity in a face saving attempt to impute social ‘purpose’ to artists of the calibre of Salvador Dali. And Jonathan Kalb[6] has shown us how Beckett has deliberately attempted to avoid the analysis of those who wish to apply social constructs and allusions to his work. What I am trying to show is that while many artists may pursue a social goal when making their pieces, works of art are not described as such as direct result of the success or otherwise of such pursuits. They are contingent factors of some works rather than necessary factors of all works. Unlike ‘function’, ‘purpose’ does not rely on consequences in order to be so described. ‘Function’, on the other hand, must be fulfilled else we have a demonstrated case of dysfunction and many of the thousands of works produced each year seeking to be described as art are dysfunctional (which merely serves to point out that making art is not an easy task). But ‘purpose’ need not be a concern when making or appreciating art which is, of course, one of the reasons why we can have such things as works of art produced by an elephant. History would seem to demonstrate that it is part of the nature of some of our developing artists to challenge our preconceptions about what art is or could be (an identifiable purpose). In such instances the purpose generally serves the form (and specifically, the genre) in which the work participates. Without these challenges to our understanding, our interest in art would be regulated to a mere hobby akin to the collecting of business cards or decorative curios.
Obviously when discussing ‘function’ and ‘purpose’ in art I must presuppose arguments that I cannot defend in the scope of this essay. It is my view that the term ‘art’ when applied to particular works is a classificatory (rather than evaluative) concept denoting achievement within a ‘form of life’.[7] The function of a work allows us in the first instance to describe such a ‘form of life’ as an ‘art form’ for it serves to extend our understanding of the realm of the form. It is in this sense that the work serves its form promoting the form as worthwhile for its own sake. This does not mean that the work must be pleasing for even the most depressing work may extend our understanding. Excellence of a work is determined by the integration (the integrity) of its three obvious aspects and their constituent parts and how they contribute to a wider understanding of the form in which they participate. By way of example, consider those highly prized works of Shakespeare. For Wittgenstein ‘language’ was a ‘form of life’. Shakespeare’s works show us clearly how language may be revered for its own sake rather than as a tool of humankind. Shakespeare’s works extend our understanding of this form of life called language and demonstrate it to be an art form we call Literature[8]. If we remember that the average university student has a vocabulary nearly twice as large as that demonstrated in all of Shakespeare’s plays (12 thousand words), we can, in a small way, recognize the excellence demonstrated in his plays.
Clearly, the example I have chosen is an obvious one and works of other artists will require us to evaluate how such things as modes of language, phraseology, manner of presentation and subject matter, etc. are integrated to determine excellence and equivalent criteria can be demonstrated in our other art forms which have different constituent parts. Simply put, my argument is that works of art are sui generis , unique examples of a kind which function to promote the art form in which they participate. In turn, the nature of the form challenges us to seek out further examples to try its limits. Appreciating art is much like a marriage; you get out of it what you put into it and it becomes its own reward.
Whether works of art participate in a system such as I have described (I believe they do) is not the issue of this essay. What I have been attempting to question is if works of art have a ‘function’ as the term is understood. If art is not a system then we will be hard put to demonstrate the ‘function’ of the works that promote it and we would be forced to conclude that art is functionless. Many would find this a deplorable state of affairs. On the other hand, if we resolutely hold that works of art do have a function then we would do well to ask ourselves: What state of affairs needs to exist to demonstrate that some works are dysfunctional; do not serve their function? Will we still call these works art? How should we describe them? The consequences of our answers to these questions will show us how we are using the term ‘art’.
Launt Thompson
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[1]Hudson, Kenneth The Dictionary of DISEASED ENGLISH , The Macmillan Press Ltd. ,London, (1978) pp 96.
[2] Ibid. pp xxiii
[3] Emmet, Dorothy, M. ‘Functionalism in Sociology’ in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy Vols. 3 & 4 , Macmillan and Free Press, Reprint Edition 1972, New York (1967), pp258.
[4] Recognizing that some historians would argue that much of history is an imagined reality, I am trying to draw a distinction between the fiction of what could possibly be the case and the fact of what is or was the case.
[5]Plekhanov, G.V. Art and Society, Oriole Editions, New York, (1974)
[6]Kalb, Jonathan, ‘The Question of Beckett’s Context’ Performing Arts Journal 32 Vol.XI No.2. (1988) pp 25. - 44.
[7] I would like to believe I am using the term ‘form of life’ as Wittgenstein uses it. See: Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical Investigations , Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1978.
[8] Part of the phenomenon of Shakespeare was that he was able to participate in two different art forms simultaneously, Literature and Theatre which have the same medium.
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