elizabeth haines essay

Elizabeth Haines Essay

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Do the Arts really need Aesthetics? If not, who does? (Published in the David Jones Society Journal, Summer 2001.) The painter Barnett Newman said: ‘I feel that even if aesthetics is established as a science, it doesn’t affect me as an artist. I’ve done quite a bit of work in ornithology and I have never met an ornithologist who thought that ornithology was for the birds.’ If, like ornithology for birds, aesthetics is not for artists, then who is it for? Is it only for the edification of other aestheticians, or does the work they do filter down to lovers of the arts? A way of approaching these two questions is to look at the reciprocal influence that the philosophy of the arts has upon the actual practice of them. I will briefly outline Danto’s two apparently contradictory claims in Chapter 3 of his Transfiguration of the Commonplace that firstly, for non-philosophers, the philosophy of art has always seemed to be unproductive and irrelevant, giving rise to a certain amount of hostility by practitioners towards the theoretical treatment of their activity. Secondly he then states that ‘the philosophical question of art’s status has almost become the very essence of art itself, so that philosophy, instead of standing outside the subject, and addressing it from an alien and external perspective, has become instead the articulation of the internal energies of the subject.’ Danto goes on to expand these ideas in his own way, but I will use them as a starting point and then develop them from a different perspective. I shall attempt to refute the second statement, and find a way between these two positions by examining more closely the nature of the ‘languages’ of the arts, and the relationship which they can have with philosophy. I have used the word ‘language’ here to refer to the modes of expression peculiar to each art. The word is not entirely satisfactory with its associations of ‘tongue’, but I also wanted to draw a comparison between normal linguistic expression and the other arts. Secondly, for brevity’s sake, I sometimes use the singular form of the word ‘art’, while intending it to include all the arts, literature, music and so on. Since the 18th century, the plethora of theories as to art’s defining features does seem to betray a deep-seated perplexity about the nature of the arts and their place in society, as well as their meaning and function for the individual. This begs the question as to why such definitions have been, and still are, so ardently sought, in other fields as well as aesthetics. I, like other practitioners, wonder how these definitions actually enlighten anyone when confronted with something which is purported to be a work of art: do they help us decide whether it is one, and if so is it a good one, and other related questions. In other words, whether the interest we take in the arts is in danger of becoming absorbed by philosophical enquiry, and having come under its sway has become separated from the sensibility with which it is more naturally associated. That is to say, the arts themselves were not a philosophical problem until ‘aesthetics’ came along. In fact, if, as Danto says, the philosophy of art has become central to art itself, then this entanglement of art and aesthetics could lead to the situation where contemporary art only speaks to those who have read the theories from whence the art came. Danto’s first claim about the irrelevance of philosophy to those ‘inside’ the life of art seems to indicate that it is not so much the practice and enjoyment of the arts which needs these theories, but that the practice of philosophy needs them. It spawns them to satisfy its own cast of mind which seeks such explanations, the arts being one of those subjects which are amenable to philosophy. Danto then goes on to ask ‘Why is it that art can be the sort of thing of which there can be a philosophy,’ and replies ‘I believe the things of philosophical moment to be logically closed’ (and that there are) ‘a whole cycle of internally related topics … (so that the philosopher) will inevitably come to art. He doesn’t go on to tell us what characterizes those fields but one could say that a subject amenable to philosophy is one whose boundaries have not yet been defined, or cannot be envisaged. Or it could be a subject whose boundaries were once well defined but which is now in a state of flux; this makes it susceptible to philosophical enquiry, and its very recalcitrance to easy answers makes that enquiry worthwhile. Perhaps all of the arts have been less susceptible to enquiry during phases of their development when the tradition was well established, and changes occurred more gradually than they have done in the 20th century. The emergence of entirely new forms, and at an unprecedented rate, such as atonality in music and Dada in the visual arts, prompt many questions about ontology and value, and perhaps it is in this ‘insecure’ state that the arts are more susceptible to questions about their status and nature. There was a time, presumably, when there can have been no possibility of such perplexity about the nature and definition of art. This was partly because no complex abstract language existed in which to express it. That is to say, arguments about the definition, meaning and purpose of the arts are not only parasitic upon the actual practice of them, but the perplexity is to some extent one which has arisen through the use of language. This dialogue between practice, criticism and philosophy could not have existed before the sophisticated use of language exerted its influence on the way we think. Questions of this kind and complexity (such as the questions about the relations between the ‘sister arts’ or whether there exist reliable criteria for something’s being a work of art) can only arise and be framed in a culture where logical disputation is common. And this kind of disputation is itself enhanced by the use of writing. Because (or in spite of) the absence of any written scripts, we have no reason to suppose, for example, that the painters of the Lascaux caves had the degree of sophistication of speech language which allowed them to make fine distinctions between, say, pleonasm and tautology. The long process by which the activities we now call the arts have acquired their own laws and conventions is clearly too complex for anything but the briefest outline. All I want to show here is that it appears that symbolic representations such as painting, sculpture and engraving antedate writing by many thousands of years, and that it must have been writing that gave the real impetus to increased mental powers of introspection and analysis. In that I cannot really know what I think till I hear what I say, I have not the power to reorganize what I think until I see what I say. It seems pertinent to remind ourselves of an outline chronology here. It looks as though humans were engaged in the kind of activities which developed into what we call the arts at about 90,000 years ago. The Neanderthal grave with flowers from about this time possibly indicates a sense of reverence for a fellow human and a sensibility towards the unknown. The Venus of Willendorf of 25,000 years ago is believed to be significant as some kind of votive figure. Although we cannot be certain as to the meaning of the paintings in the Ardêche and Lascaux caves, at about 20-30,000 years BC, the community which produced them must by then have had language skills which enabled them to describe the difference between a real reindeer and a painted one. A flute of bird bone, 9,000 years old, has been found in China which plays the pentatonic scale, indicating a quite sophisticated grasp of the organization of pitched sound. The first written scripts, however do not emerge until about 3,500 BC, which indicates the relatively late part that writing played in the development of human thought. And writing (and so reading), unlike the sequential medium of speech, is a ‘parallel’ mode of thought, allowing recapitulation and reappraisal along the way. It is half way between the presentational image and storytelling. This indicates that the activities of image-making, modelling and no doubt singing and dancing were some of the earliest means by which humankind attempted to interpret phenomena which were significant to them, and also events which seemed beyond their control; as they did this they both expressed an understanding of the human condition, and so expanded that understanding. This being so it seems reasonable to infer that these kinds of activity, which we have come to call the arts, are more deeply rooted in human consciousness than the more supposedly precise activities of writing and mathematics. In the same way, the child draws before it writes and so proceeds from a seemingly less accurate but no less expressive mode of thought to a more focused one. Over the millennia, each art, because of its particular medium and the materials it uses, has developed into a unique mode of thought for both the artist and audience; those thoughts and ideas are inseparable from the mode in which they are expressed. The artist, musician, choreographer or architect does not start with a ‘verbal’ idea which he then translates into material: the idea very often comes out of the material. The critic Hanslick said ‘The composer composes and thinks, but he composes and thinks in tones’ and the painter Ernst Zobole maintains that ‘Of course it is possible to have all sorts of theories and ideas, but what it comes to in the end is to use paint rather than words – to do your talking or thinking with your medium.’ The sculptor Anish Kapoor asserts that ‘The role of an artist is to discover that which is outside of words.’ By prescient criticism or interpretation we may be able to give insight into a work of art, but that should only serve to draw us back to contemplate the work itself. As we look or listen, something is being made known to us through another ‘language’, one which we do not necessarily have to speak to be able to understand. Hywel, the poet warrior, David Jones declares, may well have had a keen visual awareness, but he would not have given us ‘ … a single line of his famous poem in praise of North Wales unless he first loved an art form or rather had himself been mastered by the elusive constraints of that very specialized art, Welsh 12th-century prosody.’ Poetry, as R.S. Thomas has said, comes from language, not from the landscape. The prolonged involvement with the material of any art, in making you more keenly aware of that medium, also hones the senses through which it primarily operates. It is thinking through seeing, thinking through hearing, thinking through movement, touch and even taste. The influence of the medium – the material to hand – has always been of paramount importance. Throughout the ages new materials have offered new possibilities, from the invention of moveable type, oil paint and the keyed trumpet, to electronic tape, the microphone and laser printing. It is characteristic of the arts that they feed upon their own mediums and draw inspiration from them, creating new syntheses with that other kind of raw ‘material’ which they import from the outside world. These new materials and modes of presentation themselves evoke thoughts which could not have been embodied in any other way. Perhaps this is what Mendelssohn meant when he said that words ‘ … have so many meanings, they are so imprecise, so easy to misunderstand, in comparison with music. A piece of music … expresses thoughts to me that are not too imprecise to be framed in words, but too precise. But it is inevitable that a practitioner would hold this view, because his familiarity with the medium refines his ability to both find meaning in it and use it meaningfully. So it seems that it is the artist’s prolonged and committed use of a medium that gives him increasing expressive power, just as the use of words does for the writer. In both cases, the symbols and, more specifically, the context in which they are used, acquire increasing transparency of meaning. In its widest sense, all language is essentially a means of communication between people, a transmission and reception of ideas and feelings. But all art and language have this in common, that their use actually creates new insights and subtleties of meaning. In this sense, then the arts must be seen to be ‘languages’ of a kind. The arts can articulate relationships, states of affairs, tensions, feelings, situations, each in a unique way. Without the medium of each art’s language, the message is stillborn. There is also another significant aspect shared by both words and the languages of the arts, one which is, as it were, the reverse side of the first aspect: working in a particular artistic medium also draws the practitioner into a heightened awareness of the medium; he can become consciously aware of this kind of thought-in-sound or gesture, or thought-in-colour in a way which allows him to detach it from its current application and envisage its use in another context. Danto comments on the similarly self-reflexive trait of philosophy when he says that ‘ … whatever I think about, I at the same time learn something about it, and about thought itself.’ Danto goes on to say that while philosophy has this peculiar trait, its nature is also such ‘ … as to be logically co-implicated with anything it might treat of (the first of the two similarities)’. The artist, then, might answer that since his language is certainly co-implicated with anything it might treat of, then the arts can be shown to have this reflexivity too. If they have, then this casts a different light on the possibility of philosophy being able to infiltrate art, to become interior to it, in the way that Danto suggests. As a modification of his thesis, the self-reflexive trait in the arts could operate something like this: if I think about something, then at the same time as I learn about the something, it is possible to learn about thought itself. If this principle is carried over to the arts, then, even if I am not a practitioner, the something I learn about or experience through the medium of an art, could teach me something about the art’s mode of ‘thought’. Whether or not this enables me, in Croce’s sense, to ‘become an artist’ is a different matter. This being so, what is ‘reflexed’ is a something already inside the art, a particular way of thinking in that art’s special language. These ways of thinking, ways of having ideas, could include playing with perspective, or the intervention of the narrator, the idea of focus, or the emotive properties of colour and rhythm. Others could include the very experience of the work, a feature which we can trace, for example, to contemporary ‘interactive’ installations in the visual arts. The blurring of distinctions between performer and audience can lead to the repositioning of musicians amongst the audience, or the ‘open-ended’ novel. We can play with ideas as to where the work begins and ‘real’ life ends. A development of this is that medium-related ideas, inherent in artistic practice, can themselves be fed back into the art as subject matter and content. What becomes foregrounded in some kinds of contemporary work are the means of presentation, and it is these which seem to absorb into themselves the question of their own identity. These were originally the means whereby content was communicated; they become that in which content is embodied, and gradually can become the content itself. In much avant-garde work what has become central are ideas which have been suggested by the medium, and by the way of working with it. In fact, the medium itself has become the subject matter of its own messages. In this way all the arts evolve from within themselves, and as we recognize in contemporary art echoes of an earlier tradition, we can enrich our experience of both. By foregrounding these medium-related ideas, the arts create and promote an awareness of their own languages. But if this is the case, then it follows that the language that (each) art becomes conscious of must be its own. Each of the arts embodies a unique mode of thought, by operating in a medium which not only transforms ideas at source, but is itself part of the idea. Like any language, the medium of each art contributes to its own renewal; art is both the victim of its limits and the extender of those limits. This means that no mode of thought other than that which is natural to the art in question could ever become central to it. Danto says the question which becomes internal to art, that of its own status, is a question which has come to it from outside, from philosophy. And philosophy is irrevocably couched not only in speech, but in writing. So it looks as though Danto is in danger of saying that philosophical consciousness has so infiltrated art that, like a cuckoo in the nest, it ousts the qualities on which that art originally depended. My thesis is that the arts have not absorbed into themselves the philosophical question ‘What is art?’ to the extent that the tradition or history of art is at an end in the way that Danto suggests. They have undoubtedly had an exchange with philosophy at a time when the pace of change made them particularly susceptible, and which has spurred them to further renewal. I have already, in support of this claim, shown that the arts are, and have been for millennia, unique ways of having ideas. And art renews itself, like other fields of activity, out of its own condition as well as out of an exchange with ideas external to itself. The arts have even been dominated by other interests for a time, such as by the Church in the Middle Ages. But they have used these restrictions so imposed upon them to extend themselves, find new strengths and to reassert their identities. Danto suggests that it was works such as the Brillo Boxes which rendered the traditional definitions of art irrelevant. This being so, we had to have these works themselves to challenge both their own tradition and the definitions which had hitherto attended them. Philosophical argument, the owl of Minerva, then came in art’s wake; there must be art before there can be philosophy of art. And art, we remember, had from the earliest times associations of making, fitting together, ordering, arranging, as David Jones has said ‘carpenteries of song’. The backwash of all this is that the meanings of art are now so much under discussion, so much in flux, that there is a very real tendency to become nervous of approaching any art directly. Perhaps it is a surfeit of criticism (at one remove from the subject) and of philosophy (at one more remove) which is the culprit to some extent here. Like the people watching the ‘Emperor’s new clothes’ procession we are in danger of losing the direct connections that our eyes and ears make with our minds. We have also lost the context which we imagine was in place for the community of Lascaux. As the 20th-century artist Paul Klee said: ‘The people are no longer with us’. But if chatter among a circle of bystanders is not to be the end of both ornithology and aesthetics, then does aesthetics have a function other than as a goad to its subjects? Does it help us to learn to love the arts, or distinguish between them, or tell us if they are good ones? Is it even supposed to do these things? I am inclined towards the conclusion that the arts and philosophy are activities which may seem to pass each other by, but in fact they interact at many points, and exert a profound reciprocal influence on each other, in ways which we may not immediately recognize. But I am not sure whether it was art or philosophy which gave me this idea. An earlier version of this paper was delivered to the Philosophy Colloquia at the University of Wales, Lampeter on 14th February 2001. I am grateful to the audience on that occasion, whose comments and questions led to a number of refinements in the argument. References: Cowan, J.G. The Elements of the Aborigine Tradition. (Shaftsbury: Element, 1998). Danto, A. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981). Dalby, D. The Linguasphere Register. (Hebron: The Linguasphere Press, 2000). Hanslick, E. On the Musically Beautiful. (trans. G. Paysant) (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986). Jones, D. Epoch and Artist. (London: Faber and Faber, 1973). Klee, P. On Modern Art. (London: Faber and Faber, 1969). Le Huray and Day, P.and J. Music and Aesthetics in the 18th and early 19th Centuries. (Cambridge: University Press, 1981). Newman,B. Selected Writings and Interviews. (New York: A. Knopf, 1990). Pach, W. Renoir. (New York: Harry Abrams, 1984). Soby, J.T. (ed.) Arp. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1958). Wittgenstein, L. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. (trans. D.F. Pears & B.F. McGuinness) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974). INTERNET: njh @hvi.net 1. Quoted in Martin Bernstein and Martin Picker. An Introduction to Music, 3rd ed. (Englewood Cliffs. N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1966). p. 369. 2. Meyer Schapiro. The New Viennese School.” The Art Bulletin 18 (1936): 258-266. 3. Theodore Reff. ‘Painting and Theory in the Final Decade,” Cézanne: The Late Work (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1977), p. 47.