In Defence of Kitsch.

I might as well state my position up front. I’m a philistine and if the description, offered by several authorities on the subject, is true I am thick, passive and bone idle.  Ironically, the Philistines were technological and culturally advanced peoples.  Be that as it may it is also true that I have been a theatre practitioner for over forty years posing for half those years as an academic teaching theatre practice.  I find all talk about aesthetics a huge bore.  Philosophers who write about aesthetics have fashioned one great straw house with 100 empty rooms and when you find out what it is they are actually trying to say you wonder why on earth they even bothered.   It is clearly evident that those who go to art museums, buy art or make art do not waste their time reading the pontifications of our aesthetic shepherds who read each other and spend their academic lives trying to get their colleagues to salute their most recent opinion and forget their past indulgence in sophistry.  Few, if any of these prestigious elite, have lived for their art as I have done for over forty years and few have had the passion to make art and suffer the consequence of public failure or experience the life-renewing satisfaction of success.   Few philosophers know art from the inside but these bishops of aesthetic pleasure unsheathe their language skills and concoct a potion that both the artist and the layperson find difficult to stomach.   Do I protest too much?  If so it is because I have spent 21 years in academia researching the philosophy of aesthetics and have come away parroting Barnett Newman’s reputed statement that aesthetics is for the artist what ornithology is for the birds.  This is as true for viewers of art as it is for artists. 

Now that I have that off my chest let us consider Kitsch.  Kitsch is probably the most ubiquitous cultural artefact in existence.  Kitsch is everywhere, in our homes, at work, on telly, on the internet, in our shops, in our parks, our airports, in our elevators, in our theatres and hidden in our gardens.  We humans covet kitsch with a passion unrivalled by our desire for sex, fast food or fast cars.  Even the most sophisticated of persons harbours a stash of kitsch stored well away from prying eyes.  It engages us; we can’t do without it.  Our sense of well-being is confirmed by our indulging in kitsch.

Tomáš Kulka writing in Kitsch and Art[i] goes out of his way to show that kitsch is aesthetically worthless.  He is somewhat snobbish about it at one point arguing:

Whether or not trash novels or schmaltz music should be properly regarded as kitsch one thing is clear:  They belong to the same category of things that have considerable mass appeal, but are considered by the art-educated elite to be of no real value.  In other words I shall be concerned with those popular works that a large section of the population considers art, but which are viewed by others as a mere substitute for art. (76)

Kulka obviously considers himself to be one of the art-educated elite and he sets out the conditions for identifying Kitsch:

First Kitsch must be highly emotionally charged.

1.      Kitsch items… “are charged with stock emotions that spontaneously trigger an unreflective emotional response.”

A classic example would be a work such as this painted on black velvet.

                        

Another example would be this greeting card.

                         

Kulka argues that “The aim of kitsch is not to create new needs or expectations, but to satisfy existing ones.”(15)  “The deciphering of the picture must be as effortless as possible.”(19)  which leads us to Kulka’s second condition:

2. The object or themes depicted by kitsch are instantly and effortlessly identifiable.

Such as:

 

                                           and  

 

Kulka has one more condition that must be satisfied before we can identify kitsch.

3.  Kitsch does not substantially enrich our associations relating to the depicted object or themes.

 Such as:

 And

           

Kulka holds:

Condition 1. restricts the range of themes that can be profitably exploited by kitsch while conditions 2 and 3 pertain to the stylistic properties’ manner of presentation.  Each of the three conditions is considered to be necessary: if our artist violates any of them he will not produce kitsch.  Taken jointly, they are considered sufficient: the artist who fulfils them is most likely to produce kitsch. (26)

Kulka wants us to believe that Kitsch is not merely bad art, rather it is no art at all.  Of course in order for Kulka to hold this view he must have a theory as to what constitutes art.  He concedes that some kitsch works may demonstrate a high degree of artistic competence consequently he must turn to aesthetic concerns to produce an argument:

“As it is clear that typical kitsch paintings cannot be disqualified on the grounds of technical incompetence, we must look for more subtle signs of defectiveness.  Since we want to demonstrate the aesthetic deficiency of kitsch, we should first single out the aesthetic properties that make works of art in general good art, then show that kitsch fails to exhibit them to a sufficient degree.” (34)

So Kulka overlooks artistic properties in favour of aesthetic ones.  More to the point for Kulka it is aesthetic properties that define a work as art and these aesthetic properties must (after Beardsley) demonstrate ‘unity, complexity and intensity’.

So this work by Norman Rockwell fails the complexity condition and does not qualify as art:

                 

American readers of the Saturday Evening Post will certainly recognize this image of Thanksgiving dinner at grand ma’s so the first and second conditions are satisfied.  While we may become sentimental remembering our own Thanksgiving dinners, the painting does not particularly enrich us.  Nevertheless it is unequivocally a work of art however commonplace it may be. It is not bad art nor is it inept though it is unquestionably kitsch in Kulka’s terms.

Of course much art nouveau qualifies as kitsch.  Take a look:                                                   

And what about Lorenzo Lotto’s 16^th century painting of Venus and Cupid?

It is not hard to recognize that Venus is being sprayed with Cupid’s urine as part of a fertility ritual.  As a humorous work it satisfies all three of Kulka conditions.

It is my contention that Kulka’s argument fails because he does not recognize that aesthetic concerns are merely contingent to some works of art.  We do not determine the value or identity of a work to be art as a result of being able to apply aesthetic descriptions to it.  Works of art must satisfy artistic criteria, not aesthetic criteria (I will show this in an upcoming post titled ‘The Concept of Art’).  When discussing the value of a work Michael Findlay[i] argues:

“What many people who spend a lot of time looking at art do agree on is what separates a successful work of art from one that may be merely interesting or typical.  Mastery of the medium, clarity of execution and authority of expression are vital criteria applicable to all works of art.” Digital edition Location 860 of4365 

These criteria fulfilled need not demonstrate so-called aesthetic properties within a work.

Launt Thompson

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?field-keywords=Launt+Thompson&url=search-alias%3Daps&x=16&y=9

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[i] Kulka,Tomáš, Kitsch and Art, The Pennsylvania State University, 1996

[i] Findlay  Michael, The Value of Art, Prestel Verlag, Munich, London, New York, 2012

Conventions and Art: Mistakes, Mysteries and Misnomers. Part II.

In Part I of this essay I demonstrated a distinction between customs and conventions.  I argued that conventions presuppose the applications of language.  A convention is a description; it is how we describe the world.  In effect all conventions are language conventions.  Indeed to describe something as art is invoking a convention whereas a custom in the sense we are discussing it is a habitual, commonly followed or traditional practice.   While conventions may be customary and customs may invoke or entail a convention they are distinctly different activities.  This is important because artists commonly invoke totally new conventions, requiring new descriptions of their work as a means of promoting understanding.  For example consider the painting below.

This work is by the well-known artist Sydney Nolan and its subject matter will be easily recognized by Australian viewers and those familiar with Australian history or art.  It is a picture of our most famous bushranger/outlaw Ned Kelly but we need to apply a convention to understand it and because Australians are so familiar with the character it depicts they do it automatically.  Here we see a two dimensional caricature of a horse and a ‘thing’ connected to a broom with a landscape in the background.   The ‘thing’ looks like a pot on the horse’s back with a piston sticking up out of it only the piston has a see-through slot with two ball bearing-like things in it.  All are two dimensional in what is called a naïve style.  I’m sure you will recognize this is not the correct description but how do we describe this painting?  Its title is Ned, does that help?  I think not for sometimes titles of paintings are merely labels. Well here are two more pictures for those of you who are not familiar with Ned Kelly.

                              

                                                                                     

                                                     

The picture on the left shows us the home made body armour that Ned Kelly was wearing when he was captured.  The etching on the right depicts the bushranger in action wearing his armour under his coat.  Now we can understand how the artist arrived at his caricature.  What I described as a pot we can now describe as body armour, the piston is head gear and the ball-bearings are eyes peering through the slot in the head gear and the broom is a rifle.  As my earlier description was a convention so is my latter description for conventions are arbitrary descriptions.  Nevertheless the latter description is the one that provides us with an understanding of what is taking place in Nolan’s screen-print.  Nolan’s painting is something of visual metaphor for the Ned Kelly legend.  As I noted in part I of this essay conventions provide us with a context that allows us to adjust our thinking about how a new aspect of our art-reality is to be understood.  The quality of a work of art is a direct result of how we are obliged to describe it; the conventions we must use.   Nolan has chosen a naive style reminiscent of Rousseau’s primitive manner but highly original in his attempt to capture the scape of the Australian bush and its most famous outlaw. 

Now let us consider a different art form that presents us with a visual perspective.

                                     

What conventions must we use to describe this work by Barbra   Hepworth?   We don’t have to describe it at all if we wish but that would pre-empt our ability to discuss it or think about it.  We have before us three smooth stones or rocks perhaps made of marble and arranged in a specific fashion on a stone slab.  What are we expected to make of it?  I doubt we would be allowed to handle them and their position seems to be significant to our understanding.  In this instance the title of the work provides us with the convention we need to understand the artist’s work.  It is titled Three Forms and by describing each of these pieces as a form we can see the point of their juxtaposition and why they are smooth.  The artist has created a work of contrasts using the same material for each different piece which enhances the notion of forms.  The artist has offered us in three dimensions what we often see as two dimensional forms and we are reminded of this by the shadows of each form that fall onto the slab.  It is an exercise in demonstrating the forms within a work as opposed to the form of the work.  Again a convention opens the door to understanding.  Here is another work by an Australian Artist that I purchased without having any idea of the title.

                          

For me it captures the colours of the Australian bush and the denuded, charcoal encrusted trees left standing after a bush fire.  Completed entirely with a palette knife I recognized from the different shades and strange shapes different levels of the landscape and while I was curious about them I was impressed with the skill and talent of the artist.   That description is, of course, a convention.  I’m sure it may be described in a number of ways but when I learned that the title of the work was Gravel Pit all I could say was yes of course it is. The boarders of the pit are presented as dark green and we see different shades of earth as we look down into the pit, a style we can liken to post-impressionism.  Light is diffused, hazy as if the bushfire smoke lingered.  The painting is made up of delineated shapes of colour reminiscent of Cezanne’s Bibemus Quarry paintings.

Bibemus Quarry

Of course it is not always the case that understanding is forthcoming as a result of the artist’s chosen title.  Sometimes it is left to the viewer to come up with an appropriate convention in order to grasp the flavour of a work such as Jackson Pollock’s Number 28.

                        

This is what The Metropolitan Museum of Art offers as a description by way of a well-known art critic.

The dominant critic of the day, Clement Greenberg, called such works "polyphonic." "Knit together of a multiplicity of identical or similar elements," he wrote, this art "repeats itself without strong variation from one end of the canvas to the other, and dispenses, apparently, with beginning, middle, and ending."

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Well I guess that’s one way to describe it.  Still another way is:

In Number 28, l950 there is such a careless grace, a feeling of inevitability, a weaving in and out of those thick and thin black lines over a deep galaxy of silver and blue space.

What gives us such a lift are those solid, well placed, low and thick obstructions. But they don't hold us down! There is a whirling, wild sense of freedom here, and at the same a most cunning arrangement of space as to line, thick as to thin, rise as to fall, abrupt angle and surprising dash. Here, impediment is a means of freedom, and the artist's beautiful, central ambition is satisfied, and we are satisfied. We feel we can be ambitious to be free like that. It is a sign, as Eli Siegel has described, of the world itself making beautiful sense, and we like it.  By Dorothy Koppelman

I suppose it is the signature of much modern and contemporary art that the viewer must invent their own descriptive handle by which to grasp such works.  While they can easily be appreciated for the technique applied, the medium used and the object or result of the artist’s determined conclusion this seems not to satisfy those who believe an aesthetic description is warranted.  Neither critic mentions the fact that the work is enamel on canvas or how the artist built the work carefully controlling his colours. Unfortunately aesthetic descriptions are always inferences (though they are often mistakenly described as interpretations) drawn to satisfy a need for understanding.  Unlike artistic descriptions they have little or no truth value nor is this necessary for they are personal conventions for private enjoyment.  Sometimes the ability to draw such inferences becomes an end in itself and the work of art is merely the catalyst.   At other times authorities seem unable to even recognize some works as art.

Artists are incessantly experimenting in an effort to create new forms and they tend to forge far ahead of the vocabulary that provides us with the means to see these works of art.  A classic example is Constantin Brancusi’s Bird In Space, a five foot bronze sculpture.     

                                               

U.S. customs impounded the piece when it was shipped to New York for an art show.  Though its elegance was obvious, customs insisted it was raw metal and imposed a tax on it.  Brancusi was forced to go to court to force U.S. Customs to release it on the grounds that it was a work of art.  U.S Customs officers were unable to apply a convention which would allow them to describe this work as art.  Having a title allows us to recognize the aerodynamic sense of flight but we may well have inferred such a description; the shape predates the Concord aircraft.

Sometimes merely having a convention to describe a new genre provides a position from which to value new methods of presentation.  Such was the case for works now recognized as belonging to the genre of Impressionism. 

                       

This work is Claude Monet’s Sunrise which is typical of the genre.  The Impressionists were trying to capture the play of light and shadow as it appeared to the artist’s eyes.  They were described as impressionists by a critic who was trying to depreciate such works but the description proved to be the key convention that allowed the public a means appreciating impressionism.

But it is not only new movements that require a convention in order to promote understanding.  Consider this work by Rembrandt.

                          

This work is described as Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer.  Could we have guessed who it was that Rembrandt was showing us?  Was Aristotle ever dressed in such a fashion?  Why do you suppose Rembrandt was trying to show us Aristotle rather than a wealthy Dutch patron?   Aristotle is not dressed as a 4^th century BC philosopher.  He is dressed in clothing contemporary with the period in which the artist painted; a common practice for Rembrandt.  He enjoyed painting such fashionable clothing for it allowed him to show off his technique with a loaded brush (called impasto) providing the work with a textual richness.

Some of you may remember those B grade war films where we saw German army officers at German Headquarters speaking perfect English (sometimes with an accent).  The convention was that we were to understand that they were speaking German in their homeland.  Rembrandt is invoking a similar convention by displaying Aristotle in contemporary Dutch dress.  We are to understand that it is the dress of a 4^th century Greek aristocrat.

Launt Thompson

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?field-keywords=Launt+Thompson&url=search-alias%3Daps&x=16&y=9

Illusion, Mirage and Optical Agitation as Art

For most people an illusion is merely a harmless visual trick.  Seldom do they ever recognize that illusions are something they perpetuate everyday which most often serve to help them stabilize their understanding of the world.  A failure to realize this fact has produced a number of false beliefs about the role of illusion in art.  Indeed, it would not be stretching the truth to say that many people unknowingly suffer from the illusion that they know about illusions. 

Illusion in the visual arts is sometimes described as the lack of correspondence between the perception of an object and the physical nature of that object.   In other words an illusion is thought to be some sort of visual mistake.  The more common examples of this type of ‘lack of correspondence’ are said to be perspective drawings or paintings where three dimensions are represented on a two-dimensional surface.  Here we are able to perceive depth where no depth actually exists as in this work by Andrew Wyeth titled Christina’s World.

                                     

                                                               

But recognizing the representation of three dimensions on a two dimensional surface is a learned ability; we have learned the convention that allows us to recognize perspective in a painting or drawing.   It is not an illusion.  Colour, light and shadow are also used to depict depth and is probably best illustrated by the works of William Michael Harnett:

                                  

Everyday objects such as a cupboard door, a bugle hanging from a nail, a violin leaning against the frame of the door, sheet music and books painted with an eye for detail and using light and shadow give us the impression of the object in three dimensions.   Abstract artist also experimented with color, light and shadow to give the impression of depth as with the work of Tom Hrusa:

                                                    

But again, we have learned to read paintings of this type, no illusion exists.  Still, there is another type of work called Op Art where the design of the artist is said to create an optical illusion such as this one by D.M. MacKay:

                                     

Perhaps a better description for such works is scintillating art for what is taking place is not so much an illusion as an irritation of the receptor cones in the eye causing a false image of pulsating lines over the fine lines receding to the centre of the work. This brief critique of supposed illusions in the visual arts is important to our understanding of the role of illusion in art and in our daily lives for the art form that most relies on illusion is theatre.   But many theatre historians also have a mistaken view of how an illusion comes about.

Imagine, an alien comes to you and asks you to explain what an illusion is.  How would you go about it?  No doubt you would want to tell him that an illusion is something that is false.  You have heard the oft repeated phrase ‘the illusion of reality’ so you might begin by telling him it is a false reality.  But your alien friend is confused.  ‘What is a reality?’, he asks.  You then explain that a person’s reality comes about as a result of those things they are able to realize about the world.    Your friend will not be put off.

‘What is a false reality?  How will I know one when I see one?’

If you have your wits about you, you will explain that a illusion is not a false object or thing, rather it is a realization that is false.  More correctly an illusion is a false ‘belief’ about reality.  It is a conviction that something is the case when it is not.  Illusions are such things that exist only in a person’s mind.   Many years ago most people believed that the sun revolved around the earth but we now know this to be false.  People who held this belief harboured an illusion and remnants of this illusion are still with us.  We often say the sun rises in the east, crosses overhead and sets in the west merely because it looks that way.  But of course it also looks as if the earth is revolving around the sun.  As an illusion is a belief we cannot describe perspective drawings as illusion unless we could show that someone was actually convinced the depth existed.   Such a situation is highly improbable for the depth could not be perceived unless someone were trained or had trained themselves to do it.  As children we learn to read photographs and drawings much as we learn to read language.

The pleonastic phrase ‘the illusion of reality’ can be found in countless books on art and the theatre and serves to misdirect and confuse our understanding of illusion.  It is a self-evident that an illusion is ‘a false belief about reality’.  We can show this by merely trying to deny it.  When we do deny it we are left holding the position that an illusion is a true belief about reality which is what we most often call knowledge.  Few of us would be prepared to defend the thesis that knowledge is illusion. 

In the art form of theatre illusion is fundamental to our understanding of it.  There can be no theatre without illusion.  Plato was the first to recognize that patrons of the theatre believed in the characters they witnessed in the theatre and he was so concerned that he would not allow actors to participate in his ideal state.  Most theatre historians naively assume that illusion in the theatre came about with the introduction of the perspective set designs of Sebastiano Serlio and his contemporaries in the mid 1500s.   But a perspective painting on a backdrop is no more than what it is.  A set may support the illusion in theatre but it is not responsible for it.  Illusion in theatre can exist when no set is used as in the ancient Greek theatre witnessed by Plato.

It is the actors in the theatre that invoke the illusion and the audience must participate in it if they are to enjoy what theatre offers.  The audience must hold a false belief about the reality of the situation they are witnessing.  No doubt some people will reject the idea that they must believe the characters in theatre.  For these people such a belief would be delusional but delusion is a form of paranoia.  Neither could such a belief be called a hallucination for a hallucination is a perception without an external stimulus.  Belief in the characters that exist in the theatre is a harmless activity that offers us many rewards.  As the philosopher A. P. Griffiths points out, “People cannot be taken to believe things they have never heard of, or could not think.”[i]   It is also true that we can believe anything we can think.  Whether we ought to or not is another matter.

However true this argument may be your alien friend may still not be convinced.  He may counter your explanation with the retort:  “Your neighbour Harry Blogs says that’s codswallop.  He says we don’t have to believe in theatre.  All we have to do is suspend our disbelief.”  What you would have to explain is that the willing suspension of disbelief is a grammatical red herring.   It was conjured up in the nineteenth century by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge as a way of getting around the argument that we should only believe what is true.  Coleridge suggested he did not believe poetry or the falsehoods of the stage to be true.  In fact he disbelieved them but in order to enjoy them he would willingly suspend his disbelief; he would not bring it into play.  Since, this has become the catch phrase for many theatre goers.

 

But disbelief is a belief in the contrary proposition.  There is no middle ground here.  To insist that you can willingly suspend your disbelief is much like saying that you promise not to read the previous sentence.  The willing suspension of disbelief starts from the premise that what is seen is false (a category mistake).  For example, ‘it is a falsehood that Hamlet is there’, therefore in order to maintain that we are rational we will admit that we disbelieve that ‘Hamlet is there’.  This means that we must either believe that ‘Hamlet is not there’ or ‘Hamlet is invisible’.  But if we do this we cannot enjoy the play so we must suspend our disbelief!  We ‘suspend’ the possibilities that ‘Hamlet is not there’ or ‘Hamlet is invisible’.  If we admit that we have seen the play the only alternative open to us is to ‘believe’ ‘Hamlet is there’.

When we go to the theatre we must be prepared to say ‘That is Hamlet’ or ‘There is Hamlet’.  We must hold the conviction that this is a correct use of language else we must admit the production to be a bad one or that we are attending the production ill prepared to accept it.  We need to hold a false belief about the reality of Hamlet; we need to create the illusion in order to participate in the hypothesis that is theatre.

Of course your alien friend may still not be convinced.  “What about Brecht?” he asks, “Brecht enlisted the aid of his ‘alienation effect’ to destroy or rid the theatre of illusion.”  You would have to explain that the situation is no different.  Brecht was mistaken. Brecht’s theatre relied on illusion as much as any.  While Brecht more often created role types rather than characters they had to be believed in order to recognize the import of his message.

Launt Thompson

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?field-keywords=Launt+Thompson&url=search-alias%3Daps&x=16&y=9

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[i] Griffiths, A. P., ed. Knowledge And Belief, Oxford University Press, London 1973 pp128.

Conventions and Art: Mistakes, Mysteries and Misnomers. Part 1.

con•ven•tion   (k n-v n sh n) n.
1. a. A formal meeting of members, representatives, or delegates, as of a political party, fraternal society, profession, or industry.
b. The body of persons attending such an assembly: called the convention to order.
2. An agreement between states, sides, or military forces, especially an international agreement dealing with a specific subject, such as the treatment of prisoners of war.
3. General agreement on or acceptance of certain practices or attitudes: By convention, north is at the top of most maps.
4. A practice or procedure widely observed in a group, especially to facilitate social interaction; a custom: the convention of shaking hands.
5. A widely used and accepted device or technique, as in drama, literature, or painting: the theatrical convention of the aside.



The above description of convention is from the free online dictionary and leaves much to be desired when coming to an understanding of a convention.  While some conventions are customary and most customs, conventional there is a very distinct difference between the two.  They are not synonymous.  Conventions presuppose the applications of language.  A convention is a description; it is how we describe the world.  In effect all conventions are language conventions.  The shaking of hands is not a convention, it is a custom.  The convention is something like the description ‘this is a gesture of good will’.  Of course if we are shaking our hands at someone we may describe it as saying ‘goodbye’ or ‘hello’.  If our hand is a raised clenched fist that we are shaking we may describe the activity as ‘ranting’, all these descriptions are conventions.  Again the description is the convention and not the activity; the activity may or may not be customary.   I will demonstrate later why this distinction is important to the arts.

Items 1. a. & b. in the above definition are clearly different senses of the term convention but item 2. is a classic example of how a convention is understood.  We understand that prisoners of war are doomed to be treated in some way but a contract between nations describes what particular way they will be treated and this description (the convention) is what is applied to determine if the contract has been fulfilled.  Item 3. above is wrong; it is only by custom that north is at the top of most maps.  I’ve dealt with item 4. so I will attend to the role of convention in the arts.

One of the more common prosaic conventions is the describing of the movement of the earth as ‘the sun is setting’ or the ‘sun is rising’ (See Sorry, Earnest the Sun doesn’t Rise in this blog).  We know the sun doesn’t set or rise but, customarily, we invoke a convention; we describe it that way.  We could equally say the horizon was turning toward or away from the sun and be describing the same events.

One reason this distinction is important is that we are always free to create a new convention but the attempt to create a new custom is something of an oxymoron.  A custom in the sense we are discussing it is a habitual, commonly followed or traditional practice such as decorating a Christmas tree or walking on the kerb side of the pavement when escorting a guest. 

By definition a custom is not new but in the arts we often confront a new convention created to help us understand what it is we are viewing or listening to.  Indeed, often the first step in the evolution of a custom is the creation of a new convention. For the most part conventions in art are imperative; we must accept them in order to grasp the work.  Conventions provide us with a context which allows us to adjust our thinking about how a new aspect of our art-reality is to be understood.

In Nineteenth century theatre it was customary to open the curtain before the beginning of a performance.  The opening of the curtain prompted the description “The performance is beginning.”  In the theatre today it is not unusual that the dimming of the lights on the audience prompts the description that the play is beginning.   In many instances the set evoked the convention of place in a play though sometimes a description in the program provided an understanding of time and place such as; ‘Act I, Midnight, a country road.’

A convention entails an agreement to describe events in a particular way.  The agreement comes about by logical necessity and not because we choose to be condescending. In the game of chess we may doubt that the queen is a wanton hussy but if we do not acknowledge the convention that she is the most powerful piece on the board we will be limited in our ability to understand the game.  Just as an astronomer must describe the sun as setting to share our everyday understanding of the event, so too, must members of the audience describe the events of a stage play as real.  Macbeth is really killed though some may facetiously reply: “But the actor is not really killed!”  The retort is factitious because it is outside the bounds of the convention.  It is like saying: “The queen may be the most powerful piece on the board but she has a wooden head!”

Aeschylus, like many writers to follow, used the text to establish his convention of time and place as he does at the beginning of the AGAMEMNON.  The first actor to speak is a watchman. 
 Oh God, for an end to this weary work.                                 
A year long I have watched here, head
on arm, crouched like a dog on Agamemnon’s
roof.  The stars of night have kept me company.
I know them all, and when they rise and set.
Those that bring winter’s cold and summer’s heat –
for they have power, those bright things in the sky.
And what I watch for is a beacon fire,
a flash of flame to bring the word from Troy,
word that the town has fallen.

The scene is set, though the play is performed in an open theatre in broad daylight, the audience must accept that the action begins at night at Agamemnon’s palace else what follows will make little sense.  The convention of time and place is imperative; it has been forced upon the audience.


I’ve used an example from theatre because the on-line dictionary uses the example of the aside promoting it as a convention.  But the aside is a custom; it is how it is described that is the convention.  An aside takes place when two or more characters are present on stage and one of them speaks to himself or the audience and the other characters are described as not hearing or not seeing the event.  The very nature of the aside requires that the other characters do not acknowledge it for to do so would provoke an entirely different order of events.  By the same token the audience must describe the other characters has having not heard or seen the aside taking place else their following responses will not be understandable.  In Euripides’ Hecuba the Trojan queen addresses herself in the presence of Agamemnon:

You poor wretch – I mean myself when I say ‘you’-
Hecuba, what am I to do?  Am I to fall at the
Knees of Agamemnon here or should I bear my
troubles in silence?

In this scene Agamemnon recognizes that Hecuba is wrapped in her own thoughts but he is not allowed to be described as hearing what she speaks though an audience of thousands hears it clearly.  Similar asides exist in Old and New comedy and are common in the works of Shakespeare and Nineteenth century Melodrama.  In each instance we must describe stage onlookers as not hearing else we have no way of explaining their failure to respond to the speaker of the aside.  The description is forced on us by the nature of the proceeding events which would be very questionable but for the convention we use.  The audience need not describe other characters confronted with an aside as hearing but not acknowledging the aside unless they demonstrate this is the case.

The quality of a work of art is a direct result of how we are obliged to describe it; the conventions we must use.      A few years ago some student actors staged a production of Joe Orton’s The Ruffian on the Stair. The play requires that one character menace another with a gun and eventually shoot him.  Surprisingly, the actor used what was clearly a toy cap pistol.  Though the weapon had much of the detail of an actual gun it was unmistakably a toy.  When questioned on this point, the students argued that the audience would accept the toy as actual.  They would describe the gun as real because that was how they understood it.  The students insisted that it was merely a convention and the audience would go along with it.  The students were wrong.  No doubt some sympathetic members of the audience may go along with such a corruption and say something to the effect: “Oh, I understand.  That toy cap pistol is supposed to be an actual gun” but this is not the way conventions work.  Conventions in theatre work by imperatives and imperative to the above example is that whatever else the audience may care to admit, it must admit that what it saw was not a gun.  The first rule of the theatre is ‘Don’t show the audience what you don’t want them to know, they can’t ignore it.’ 

The students were not satisfied.  They countered with the argument that most actors use a replica weapon on stage which was not an actual gun.  Why was this action correct and theirs faulty?  The students failed to grasp that, in the latter case, the audience had no information from the stage that allowed them to describe what was used as a replica.  The audience had no choice but to describe it as an actual gun.  Individually, some members of the audience may have suspected that what was being used was a replica which would not fire but this suspicion was not based on any information received from the production.  This was not the case with the student’s production.  They had, in fact, forced their audience to describe their instrument as ‘a toy gun’.  They had corrupted the convention they were trying to establish.

It is not unusual in comedies that authors and directors deliberately corrupt conventions for the purposes of satire.  In Mil Perrin’s light little comedy called The Flaw one character threatens to kill another with a cap pistol.  The victim replies: “But that’s a cap gun!” To this his assailant retorts: “So what?  This is only a play!”  The gun is fired and the victim falls to the floor in a manner that can only be described as ‘having been killed’.    The way the victim falls, clutching his chest, forces the description onto the audience who respond with laughter as they recognize the deliberate corruption of a convention.

When we wish to create new conventions in the theatre we must so organize events that a new description is forced onto the audience.  In Peter Shaffer’s Equus six horses dominate the stage and vivify the play but there are no actual horses used on stage (though this was not the case with the film).  The point is, the text requires that the horses be actual rather than imaginary.  The author recognizing the difficultly of using actual horses on stage forced a convention onto his audience.  Six adults wearing gleaming wire frames, each outlining the head of a horse, dressed in nondescript costumes and wearing raised shoes allowing them to sway and stamp in graceful equine movements obliged their audiences to describe them as horses.  It was a classic example of how theatre conventions work.  The play is about a seventeen year old boy’s psychological attachment to horses and would have failed had the technique of the dancer/actors, who portrayed the horses, shown a flaw and forced a
contrary description onto the audience.  The dancer/actors must camouflage their own personalities and shape and force the audience to project a description upon them. 

The audience needed no preparation to accept this convention.  If they wanted to participate in the theatre they had to oblige.  They could deny the convention only by showing it to be corrupt; by showing another convention that was imperative and negated the former; by showing how the actor/dancers gave themselves away as human figures through their lack of control.

All art forms and their works impose conventions on their audience, some prosaic and some very specialized.  In Part II we will discuss the visual arts and how conventions provide clues to how we understand particular works.

Launt Thompson
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The Role of ‘Function’ and the Place of ‘Purpose’ in Art.

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.