How should one think about Abstract Expressionism?
From one angle I find works by Rothko and Pollock visually pleasing, but from other angles they can seem empty and dull. They attract considerable loathing.
Abstract expressionism (A.E.) has a history, of course, just like impressionism or any other movement in art has. A.E. loathers think it is all shit, but it seems to me that there is a real difference between "the established artists" whose works sell for $$$$ (like Pollock) and slap-dash stuff that would-be A.E. artists and opportunists put up on sites like Tumblr or local art fairs.
What makes your paint dribbling experiments better than mine, or either less than Pollock's? If we paint 3 colored squares, why isn't that as good as Rothko?
One reason why my A.E. messes are nothing more than decoration is that "the moment" of abstract expressionism has passed. Dribbling paint can't be a statement in 2015, it can only be a shallow, derivative 'trick'.
What is the movement of the moment?
Abstract expressionism (A.E.) has a history, of course, just like impressionism or any other movement in art has. A.E. loathers think it is all shit, but it seems to me that there is a real difference between "the established artists" whose works sell for $$$$ (like Pollock) and slap-dash stuff that would-be A.E. artists and opportunists put up on sites like Tumblr or local art fairs.
What makes your paint dribbling experiments better than mine, or either less than Pollock's? If we paint 3 colored squares, why isn't that as good as Rothko?
One reason why my A.E. messes are nothing more than decoration is that "the moment" of abstract expressionism has passed. Dribbling paint can't be a statement in 2015, it can only be a shallow, derivative 'trick'.
What is the movement of the moment?
Comments (82)
And then, there's something to be said about having an artist create A. E. and having your Uncle say that he can do that too. One, I bet the Uncle didn't do that. They just feel like they could. I'd encourage them to try. Two, the artists we are familiar with tend to create better A.E. pieces than someone who is just trying it out. They are more visually pleasing, on the whole -- because the artist is trained in the principles of art, and practiced too.
In addition there's the originality of the works, as you note. But I see no reason why a modern A.E. couldn't do well, insofar that they just did something different with it. I rather like the paintings, personally. I spent a whole day in MOMA once, just looking. I was drawn into the abstract works more than the "explicit" works.
I could just as well say that I can actually visually 'feel the texture and temperature', 'taste the flavor of colors', 'hear the movement just hanging there' and 'smell the depth and perspective' of the painting of Jasper Johns or Pollock or Rauschenberg. :B
My main criteria of art is 'does it appeal to me'. How it appeals depends upon when and where you ask me. It just works.
I have an apartment full of various works of art. Some of the artists are known and others not. I just simply collected what appealed to my senses. (My wife recently talked me out of buying a Rauschenberg when In Nizza... gee whiz! It was rather inexpensive... oh well.)
As for why your drippings and droppings are not as valued by me...
... I've never seen them, so I can't say for sure.
Meow!
GREG
I don't care for a lot of contemporary orchestra or voice music (though I love some of it). But I rarely doze off during contemporary music. This stuff often requires considerable intellectual engagement. One may get up and walk out, or listen raptly, but one won't fall asleep.
There's a PBS show called Art21 which presents various contemporary artists and their work. A lot of it is about artists creating environments.. like sculptures the public walks through... lots of videos.. one lady sits members of the public down and just stares into their eyes. Weird, but fun.
The term, "impressionism" was initially used satirically in a review of Soleil Levant (Sunrise).
Wassily Kandinsky started out as an approximately figurative artist (1908), but over the course of a decade or so developed a style (1923) that predates abstract expression by a world wide depression and another world war IWWII). Dada too seems to prefigure abstract expressionism too. (I'm not suggesting Kandinsky was a Dadaist.)
Duchamp's Urinal is as good an example of Dada as any. I don't take it as ridiculous or stupid, but context is very important, in any art evaluation.
"Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics" applies to art and philosophy. The alleged nihilism of the current young generation didn't just happen. It's a political/philosophical/artistic/social phenomenon.
A painting of, say, the crucifixion from some Renaissance master is pretty straight forward in terms of what it's conveying and what we are to think and feel about it. But a lot of modern art is deliberately un-straight forward in terms of what it's trying to convey and how we are to react to it. Take Duchamp's Fountain, as you show us above. What the hell am I supposed to think when seeing some New York urinal? Who knows. Maybe even Duchamp doesn't know.
This is actually the reason why I don't like this kind of "art." It strikes me as a pointless waste of time, since art for me is transportative - it takes me out of myself for a short while - whereas staring at a urinal or some paint splotches on a canvas do not have such an effect. They mostly make me irritated. There are exceptions, of course, but modern art has always rubbed me the wrong way.
Thorongil, I sympathize with your stance on modern art although I always promised myself not to judge others' taste in art.
That is, it is you who should appreciate them on purely normative grounds, whatever your particular enjoyments might be. ;)
It has always seemed an unsolvable dichotomy from where I stand.
You seem to be lumping together abstract paintings with Duchamp's urinal, all under the category of "modern art". In doing so, there's a lot you will miss. Duchamp's urinal is one of the first examples of what we now call conceptual art. This is art that mocks artistry, skill, training and mastery, and renounces what was always fundamental in art: the artist as maker, applying his or her hand to a material. Many conceptual works, like those of Damien Hirst, are not actually made by the artist; they are assembled by assistants or gallery staff according to the artist's instructions. When challenged on this practice Hirst speaks with contempt about those who apply their own artistry: "A man who is great with his hands might as well make macramé." Apparently it is the job of artists to create concepts. The true artist then, for Hirst, is now a kind of stunt philosopher.
When you complain about "modern art" what you don't see is that this conceptual stuff is a world away from what painters such as Rothko, Pollock, Kandinsky, and Picasso were doing. These were brilliant, immensely skilled people who were driven to stand in front of a canvas and make things (Picasso for instance is widely considered to be one of the most technically accomplished painters of the twentieth century). I would say, that is, that they were true artists.
I am not seeking to change your taste—there is no special reason why you should be interested in looking at colours and shapes and textures arranged in certain ways—but I would like you to consider a different way of looking at abstract paintings, and at least recognize that, unlike charlatans such as Damien Hirst, these painters were doing something eminently, even traditionally artistic. They were making objects for people to look at, with their own hands, struggling to capture or explore aspects of nature and perceptual experience. These objects didn't usually have a message. They didn't usually try to tell stories. Rather, they invited people just to use their eyes, for the hell of it. What can be more straightforward than that?
Skilled, trained, and dedicated painters, who wanted to make a mark on the world, and who a hundred years before would have painted figuratively, wanted to try different ways of representing reality, or they wanted to explore, among many other things, the beauty, balance, and sense of energy, space, or movement that is achievable by the manipulation of basic forms and colours and textures. These paintings don't have to mean anything. Even so, I would class these artists as maintaining a millennia-long tradition, one of personal mastery and creativity.
It's easy to dismiss Pollock, but he didn't apply the paint randomly. His paintings were made with utmost care, and the result is expanses of paint with a buzzing sense of both harmony and chaos, fascinating to look at. And the Rothko, just look at it! Imagine the sheer optical pleasure of standing in front of that towering glowing canvas, and the intellectual satisfaction inherent in the experience of being confronted with one's own perception. People want to make such things because they see how deeply beauty runs through the world, right down to its basic constituents, and they have an urge to make things nobody has seen before, to extend the field of what can be made.
Even if you think abstraction is a blind alley, that a painting cannot be transportative without being figurative, it is really quite unfair on these painters to associate them with conceptual art.
And just where do you draw the line between the figurative and the abstract? What do you think of these landscapes by Turner, Cézanne, and Strindberg?
Maybe I can disarm you with an appeal to Schopenhauer. As you know, for him music was the highest art, and within the realm of music he placed absolute music, which is not about anything in particular, above program music, which is tied to a non-musical narrative (a love affair, the seasons of the year, and so on). Music, when done right...
If abstraction is so good in music, then why not in visual art? I'm not saying that it is equal to music in its range and depth, and it is true that abstract art cannot evoke the emotions as music can, but there is much it can do without the burden of narrative and representation. If Schopenhauer had lived later and been less temperamentally conservative I think he might have approved of abstract painting.
And perhaps, @Bitter Crank, some of the above goes a way towards responding to your questions in the OP. I think I know what you mean when you say these works can seem, under a certain aspect, "empty and dull", though I don't think I agree.
There's something wonderful that John Cage once said:
If I say that abstract art is somewhat akin to this attitude—for example I might say that painters no longer wanted their paintings to chatter at the spectator but instead allow space and colour to act—then it might be asked, "so what?" Isn't this a bit vacuous, a bit non-committal? A bit empty and dull? My answer, other than "not really", will have to wait.
That's just some interesting stuff I came upon these last few days that I just got reminded of when I saw the picture of the "Readymade Fountain" here. Not that I agree with it; personally I don't like the urinal, and I do agree with Thorongil that it does not give me an aesthetic experience which makes my mind come to a halt and become fully present, with no will, passions, or desires left.
I probably am. I like Western art up until about the year 1920 or so. Most of the art created after this date irritates me. So I freely admit my knowledge of art history is largely determined by the art I like.
Quoting jamalrob
They ought to have written books, then. What they're doing is not art. But if they freely admit to being unskilled smartasses, then nothing more needs to be said.
Quoting jamalrob
Yeah, I don't have a problem with this at all.
Quoting jamalrob
I don't mind them. I especially like the third painting, actually, despite my comment earlier about paint splotches. By contrast, though, the two paintings BC linked in the OP I think are horrid, along with Duchamp's Fountain. But notice how all three artists (Rothko, Pollock, and Duchamp) were primarily active well after my 1920 cut off date. If "modern art" includes the paintings you linked, the impressionists, and the symbolists, then I can say I do like modern art. Whatever one uses to call the predominant forms of "art" after about 1920 is what I am almost universally repelled by. Is there a term for that or is it just "conceptual art" as you mentioned above?
I think you are most concerned about the lack of representation in art more than anything. Seems to me you want you art to say something, to look like something, to show us something of the world, even if it is highly stylised. The sense I get from your posts here is: "If art is not trying to clearly show meaning, through representation built by the artist, what is the point? How can something without such work, such effort towards promoting and showing a standard of perfection, by worth anything at all?"
In this respect, the earlier comparison of your approach to art as similar to Kant is misplaced (as much as I agree with the idea Kant is a dry stick in the mud who sucks the life out of everything, and that such criticism could also be applied to abstract expressionism, it's the lack of stated perfection which you struggle with in non-representation art). You hate non-representation art precisely because of how is an anti-thesis of a Kantian approach. Non-representation art functions in a very immediate sense; it is not about displaying some obvious or clear representation through the painstaking work of the artist towards perfection, but rather living the moment of the artwork itself. It is a celebration of not seeking more than the immediate affect of a work.
Appreciating Duchamp's Urinal, for example, has nothing to do with a message it shows in representation. It's all about the beauty of the object itself (if one would call it that), of experiencing its shape and environmental position, and other meanings (e.g. what constitute "Art") which are associated with it but (critically) are not found in the representation of the work. It seems to me it is this (very anti-Kantian) lack of normative prescription which you despise about "modern art."
What is art meant to be saying? Non-representational art tends to say: "Nothing in particular. This art is not for demonstrating any valued state of "perfection" in representation. It isn't a showing of any sort of better life we are meant to aspire to. Everything is (for the given art work) already "perfect." Nothing needs to be changed or made better."
(it isn't a coincidence that our art criticism mirrors the philosophical shift away from the Nihilism of theism - "we need the perfection of God for life to be worthwhile"- to the idea of life being valuable in-itself- "What does my red and orange blotch need to say? Nothing. It is worthwhile just being its own thing).
As such, I don't think it is "modern," "conceptual" or even "abstract expressionism" which you despise (though works labeled as such may more frequently be non-representational in nature). Many works which fall into those categories have some sort of representation to them. It's the expanding of art from a painstakingly and laboriously constructed demonstration of what we should aspire to, to a more accessible moment which is wholly worthwhile in itself.
Quoting Thorongil
No, or only if it's actually conceptual art as I described, in which artistry is unimportant. This is certainly not the case with Rothko and Pollock. I think maybe you should rethink your 1920s cut-off. I'm not sure it corresponds to anything. You'd be better off identifying conceptual art, which you will say--and I will only very partially and mildly dispute--is wholly crap, and not even art; and distinguishing it from completely abstract painting and sculpture, which, though you can recognize a certain artistry, you just don't like.
Quoting Thorongil
Yes, I agree. What they're doing is, I often feel, a bad way of doing philosophy as well as a bad way of doing art.
Is there a 'bad' or 'correct' way of 'doing' art?
Could you explain when and why art can be considered 'bad'?
However, I don't agree with the following distinction:
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
I think representational art is immediate, in that it transports us into a timeless realm of Ideas. The particular scene on the canvas is a means of communicating something universal.
As a general comment, since jamalrob brought up my favorite cantankerous bachelor from Frankfurt, I would be willing to admit that what is called "conceptual art" (and literally everything) theoretically has the possibility to affect the aforementioned transportative experience, but all I'm saying is that it doesn't do this for me and that it is a mistake to call it art.
Just a quick note to again emphasize that abstract painting and sculpture, including the examples in the OP, are not conceptual art and have very little in common with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_art
I'm curious...
... what exactly did the artist prior to this time do?
Did they (as I have sort of always supposed) try to 'communicate' via their art at all and if so... why didn't they simply write a book or just say what they had in mind rather than to go to all the trouble of making us sort of 'feel their intentions' via paint of a canvas?
Maybe I'm off here, but I would say that the reasons as to why the artists of the time you seem to detest painted and choose to 'communicate' as they did was that the past options of 'vocabulary' just did not fit what they wished to expressed in the context of the time in which they lived. In short... the 'vocabulary was old' and simply did not speak to their new ideas.
Instead of living in the stagnation of past rules and constraints to become a 'master of what indeed has been done many many time before' they chose the expand the vocabulary of art and chose to take a risk and pursue a new vocabulary that would question the very establishments they felt kept and maintained stagnation.
New techniques and new technical advances occurred resulting in an expanded vocabulary of art...
... exactly how is that bad?
Perhaps these unskilled smartasses were simply exposing the limitations and lack of continuation of creativity the establishment of smartasses had established as the standard of measure for all upon their own self-assumed authority?
I don't know... perhaps it would be good to inquire and who knows.... maybe they really aren't as much smartasses as one might assume?
Not all art is for everyone...
... I can live with that.
Can you?
At the moment, I'd assume you can't live with that, but I'll ask you first.
"They ought to have written books, then."
To be fair...
... any realist after the invention of the camera should have just take an photo and saved us the effort of bothering to look at their efforts of representation, eh?
Meow!
GREG
Sometimes I enjoy modern art. But I can't stand it when someone tries to shove a stupid explanation behind it (the gray was chosen for its neutrality - bah), let me decide what I think it is about. I think the worst part about modern art is that it is impossible to tell the difference between an artist and a con artist, and you end up leaving the gallery wondering if you actually liked the piece or were influenced by a description below the piece. Or you leave the gallery wondering if you either hated the piece, or were just too skeptical to open up to the possibility that the artist was actually committed to doing art and not just money and fame.
Well, that sounds like you are agreeing with my distinction. When I say "immediate," I mean that there is no transport to the "realm of ideas" via representation itself, what is shown in such work doesn't denote any particular idea at all. Perhaps "immediate"wasn't the best choice of words.
I agree representational art is "immediate" in the sense of it immediately puts one in the space or a represented meaning. There I was just using the world to point out the absence of the layer of representational meaning in non-representational work.
At this point I feel like saying: "It's art Jam, but not as you know it." The comparison to life through reference is apt. When we seek to define art, we are ultimately decreeing what expression in objects is worthwhile, we are stating what meaning in conjunction with a created object deserves to live, and which is so empty of value it is best it is wiped out.
Conceptual art is, I would argue, fruitful in many ways. It is just it can be difficult to get into from a position of art criticism, as everyone worries too much about what art is meant to be saying. Interestingly, the professed focus of conceptual art ends to shoot itself in the foot here. Successful conceptual are is actually about the object as much as anything else.
The reason conceptual artists don't "just write a book" is because they are interested in the intersection of meaning with an object. What the object does, that it is there, associated with the particular meaning of the idea, is the point. Worthwhile expression found in the moment meaning is expressed with an object, with no need for any denoting representation. An act of making and association, of stacking boxes on top of each other and proclaiming it explores the rigid complexity of growing garden, is all it takes. It's an object in a moment of expression. And this is worthwhile having. It is a pure concern for moment of an object and an associated expression.
To fully appreciate conceptual art, one actually has to turn away from the supposed idea and back to the object. Not only does it draw attention to what is actually important to conceptual art (meaning and THIS object, together, NOW), but it also points towards the aesthetics pleasures to be found in conceptual art. Once the object is granted primary place, it presence and everything which goes with it (i.e. looks, colours, smells,etc., etc.) becomes of value. There can't be the relevant intersection of meaning and object without the object. To give-up anything about the object is to destroy the celebrated moment of the work. If we stick a chair on display, it isn't a question of: "The chair is pretty because of X (e.g. design or craftsmanship)," rather is only "The chair is pretty" by existing in this context as itself. The chair doesn't need to say anything in particular or need anything more. It is valuable, is art, by it merely being object in a moment of expressing meaning.
And what have you got against urinals?
Quoting Agustino
I'm not sure when or if I experienced such a reaction to art, but... take yourself back to 1917 to the New York Armory show in which the urinal it's first and last appearance as a one-off shockeroo. it might very well have stopped any number of people in their tracks.
Notwithstanding the Kohler Company's strenuous efforts in Sheboygan, Wisconsin to turn out lovely urinals and toilet bowels, proving the attractiveness of toilet fixtures wasn't Duchamp's objective. It's been a while since I read up on the subject, but it seems to me that Duchamp was saying something about the art business, the critics, the artists, the show, and related matters. He was, sort of, a la Three Stooges giving them the finger. Among other things. Like democratizing art.
If I declare that something is art, then it is art. Maybe he found the urinal in a trash heap. Or in a hardware store -- don't know. But found objects was another one of his schticks. Put together an assemblage of odds and ends found here and there... It can look like a pile of trash or quite interesting. Sublime... hmmm, maybe not. But I haven't seen everything, yet.
But realistic figurative work continued after 1920... Have you sampled "magic realism"? Here's a sample by Paul Cadmus, Fleets In, 1934. It was commissioned by the US Navy who were initially shocked and appalled and buried it somewhere. Now it hangs in their headquarters building.
Cadmus continued to paint in a realistic style into the late 20th century, as did quite a few artists. (Some sniveling-worm critics will, of course, say that anything realistic is merely derivative and of no aesthetic significance.)
What do you take representational art to be representing? For me, the key idea behind Abstract Expressionism, is that all art is, in the final analysis, presentation, and thus by implication, non-representational.
There is a trivial sense in which it is commonly thought that a photograph represents a scene, and philosophically implicit in that idea is the tacit notion that scenes, as experienced, are true and accurate representations of the world and are the manifest half of a kind of bilateral symmetry.
If all art is non-representational, and consists, rather than in representing anything, in diverse kinds of presentings of dispositions, moods and ideas, (music being the archetypal exemplar) then Abstract Expressionism is the form of art most self-consciously formal; wherein the aim is to dissolve the form/content distinction altogether, to bring about an ecstasis in the artist and the viewer, by eliminating the traditional signs that are so prone to invoke reificational fantasies. The move to abstraction in art is, for me, related above all to phenomenology and hermeneutics, where seeing is always understood to be an interpretative act, as seeing as, and not as representing anything.
This is born out by Heidegger's interest in Van Gogh and Cezanne and Merleau-Ponty's interest in Cezanne. Cezanne and Van Gogh are, arguably, the most exemplary twin forefathers of abstraction in the visual arts. As an aside, I think 'abstraction" is itself an unfortunate term because it suggests a kind of conceptual attenuation, away from sensory experience, whereas all art [except perhaps in some senses what is called 'conceptual art'] is concerned with sensory experience and Abstract Expressionism is so in the most concrete and immanent way. In this connection think of Cezanne's statement about nature 'thinking itself though him' and Pollock's comment to an interviewer who said "you do not work from nature". His comment was "I am nature".
Of course with the familiarization that comes with time and institutionalization the most self-consciously non-representational works come to invoke their own reificational fantasies, and it becomes increasingly difficult to look at them with fresh eyes, and as we would expect the very same phenomenon happens with music.
Nothing, just not a source of aesthetical experience. Sure, it may have a political message, but in my opinion, that is not art. The purpose of art is to provide me with an aesthetic experience.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Well something can shock me in the sense that I'm like "WTF!". But that certainly is not the same thing as the reaction of awe I sometimes have when looking at art. The former isn't an aesthetic experience.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Yes, and this is precisely what I disagree with. Not everyone is an artist, and not anything counts as art. This is, in Nietzsche's language, slave morality at its best.
I wasn't planning on getting involved with this conversation as I don't know much about art. I was just listening to danielcoffeens podcast episode - Deleuze and Guattari's 'What is Philosophy' and he spoke specifically about Pollack and comparing it to the way we think of philosophy.
[quote = Rough Transcription]
I remembered just how strange philosophy is, you know, and you can say you really get Deleuze and Guattari or your really get Nietzsche. But there are enormous components that I find incomprehensible and bizarre and have no frikkin Idea what they are talking about. That's true with every philosopher for everybody. You know, for the greatest Kantian expert there are still moments that are just strange, you might have an explanation about what's going on there but the fact is every philosophy is very strange. Only through the institutional practices of normalizing it does it become something we can even talk about sanely and not sound like lunatics.
It's the same with art, you look at Pollack and he is scattering this paint on a canvas and your thinking 'what the hell are you doing dude, what the hell are you doing?' Or your look at an elaborate luscious classical scene of rape which seems to be a very common theme to a certain time... What a strange thing to do. But within an institution of art, somehow within this field of immanence or the field of affective perceptual practice that Pollack operates in, scattering paint on a canvas, putting the canvas on the floor, not looking at anything but the canvas right, not looking at an object to portray it. Overcoming all mimetic aspects or components of art, just to make art an event of splattering paint on a canvas over and against any object, the object is the paint, the object is the canvas right. There is no other object other than the act of painting, well that makes perfect sense from the perspective of Jackson Pollack and studying the history of modern art we can say 'yes, this make sense'. It's the same with philosophy, philosophy is very strange it's very personal it's very idiosyncratic...[/quote]
In this way it makes sense specifically as a reaction, comment or overcoming of your view that art needs to be representational.
I suspect that for abstract expressionists, and people like Pollock in particular, it's "doing the art" that is the crux of the matter -- and that part only the artist gets to experience. That's probably true for a sculpture and a block of marble too. Looking at a figure of marble will be nothing like the experience of carving the statue from marble.
They communicate, certainly, but what they communicate are not concepts, as one finds contained in books. They communicate the Ideas, or universals, of the particulars of which they paint. An Idea is not the same as a concept. Concepts do not transport us out of time, as happens in aesthetic experience, only Ideas do, seeing as they do not exist in time. Hence, "conceptual" art is a contradiction in terms.
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
Sure, but some things purported to be art I do not find to be art. Can you live with definitions that clearly demarcate the limits of concepts? A definition that includes everything is no definition at all. I do not mean to denigrate the creations of Duchamp et al, but I do mean to exclude them from what it means to be art.
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
No, for again, what is being represented is not the representation of a representation, but the Idea of a representation.
By the way, why did you include a maddening amount of ellipses in your post?
The Platonic Idea.
To be honest, the quote is unclear to me, so I can't honestly say how much it does in overcoming my conception of art.
I don't understand how it can make sense to say that the Platonic Ideas can be represented. Plato certainly didn't think so. He said that life 'imitates' (by which he meant not 'represents' but 'is a pale shadow of') the Idea and that Art imitates life. In any case, even if life could be said to represent the Ideas, and art to represent life; it still could not be said that art could immediately represent the Ideas.
I think Schopenhauer's use of the Ideas in his aesthetic theory is a vapid distortion of Platonism, and is more properly founded on other ideas; for one example, the more robust Romantic notion of art conveying intimations of the infinite and eternal, the kinds of idea which had already been entertained by Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Or for another example, Spinoza's notion of seeing things sub specie aeternitatis (
under the aspect of eternity).
Well it's not about overcoming it with any sort of proof or argument. Rather it's a statement about trying to understand art whilst ignoring the point of view of the artist. That even though it's strange does not make it random and meaningless. Also that it's possible to have an appreciation of it even if it doesn't make sense to us.
Personally I think your view is extremely strange, much more than a piece canvas splattered with paint. Outside of the context of the philosophical tradition, I could write off the concept of platonic ideas as some kind of madness or mysticism. Yet I can still count it as philosophy (rather than mysticism) because I can situate it as part of a tradition and I can try to understand the view you are coming from.
Again this not an argument against your position. I can't argue against your position, its too incongruous with mine.
I think the Pollock example is a detail of a painting, not an entire painting. If that is relevant...
I don't have the original hanging over my couch, (his stuff sells in the multiples of millions $$$) but as far as I know, the image in the OP is of the whole picture.
His art statement makes use of his art method. The images he saw on the road entered his text, much in the same way images enter his canvases.
I don't believe I said or implied that, and if I did, my apologies for the unclarity. The Ideas are not represented in art, but rather experienced by means of art. Art is, as it were, a reliable catalyst for experiencing them. As I said in an earlier post, literally anything can inspire contemplation of the Ideas, but art rather uniquely does this better than most things. The primary way it does this, I would submit, is because, as a representation of the world, a piece of art is one step removed from our ordinary experience of the world. In this way, we do not react the same way to a painting of a man as we do to an actual man. The latter involves all kinds of subtle, instinctual, and emotive responses, whereas the former does not or need not. The painting allows one to intellectually contemplate the man free from the constraints of embodied interaction, and in this way, uncover the Idea behind him.
Quoting John
I don't see what's so vapid about it. He's using the term as Plato does, but of course the status of the Ideas in his system is very different than in Plato's (they serve a different function). Again, I don't see a problem with this.
Quoting Thorongil
No problems, Thorongil, we all misspeak at times.
I do think there is something in your clarification of what you meant; namely that artworks may invite us to reflect on things in ways that everyday things may not. But I do not believe that it could make sense to say that the Ideas can be contemplated, because they are by definition beyond any and all interpretations and perspectives, and artworks, by contrast, seem to be the very things that are paradigmatically the most interpretative and perspectival.
Having said that I do believe that artworks are capable of evoking a sense of the numinous and the mystical. I think the numinous and the mystical are always matters of affect though, and not of intellect, and that would be where I depart from Plato's Ideas, or even Spinoza's sub specie aeternitatis. I think Kant was right that there is no intellectual intuition in those kinds of senses.
I agree with this very much. Although I do want to make a caveat that I think the best Abstract (and in a less obvious sense so-called representational) art treads the phenomenological line of ambiguity between 'raw sense' and 'seeing as'. There is always an equivocal reference to the world; as if to point out the impossibility of the phenomenological reduction.
Actually it is a detail. If you click on the following link and scroll about 75% of the way down the page you will find it. It is captioned "NUMBER 8" (Detail)
Quoting jamalrob
I just saw that you have already made the point about the difficulty of rigidly classing paintings as 'representational' and 'non-representational'.
Quoting jamalrob
Yes, and I would contend that painting can also represent those, even the ones that we generally take to be ineluctably diachronic. Still, I agree with your earlier comment that music generally has a greater affective range than the plastic arts (broadly conceived), although I have heard that people regularly weep in front of Rothko's works.
There seems to be an indication of what an 'aesthetic experience' is or perhaps must be going on here.
Care to expand on that notion?
As for what they communicate not being concepts found in books, would that not depend upon the books one reads?
Have you considered that the concepts that do not 'transport you out of time' might have less to do with the concepts, but more to do with you in particular?
Could you imagine that these concepts may well indeed 'transport one (other than yourself) out of time'?
Quoting Thorongil
I can live with you believing that this is a definition that allows/commands art to adhere to the limitations you wish to impose upon art, but I fail to see why I should be compelled to accept this limitation are more than self-imposed demarcations by yourself and should apply to any other standard of measure that is not your own.
Indeed I include much more as art and there is a great deal of what is considered to be art that I have no real aesthetic experience when I am confronted with it, but I fail to see that I am the factor that determines what is an what is not art for anyone other than myself.
Then again...
... this has probably more a fundamental ground to it in that I reject idealism and embrace relativism. I feel you cannot, nor can I or anyone else, fully define what is and is not art.
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btw... the 'maddening' number of ellipses in my posts have more to do with these concepts/notions ellipsed (as I see it) are far from agreed upon concepts/notions, just as I'm not too sure what is so 'maddening' about ellipses; thus fail to endorse that the ellipses are indeed maddening. In short... the notions are relative and I really fail to see any universal or absolute understanding of those concepts/notions.
If this helps...
... I also fail to see how anyone can answer the title question in the OP, as the notion of 'should' is rather limiting; thus I cannot endorse any 'shoulds' when it comes to an aesthetic (personal) experience.
Sorry to say, but I view certainty or truth as a process of adaptations and not as static universal/absolute values.
Meow!
GREG
Not to rain on your victory parade here, but your original question - "What do you take representational art to be representing?" - is somewhat ambiguous, for the word "representing" could also imply "communicating" or "expressing," both of which are in accord with my position that art is a catalyst for experiencing the Ideas. Technically speaking, I suppose one could call the Ideas representations, in that they still presuppose the relation of being an object for a subject, but they are not in time, space, or causal relation to each other like all other representations are.
However, it might be helpful to specify that by "representation" I mean Vorstellung. Looking back at your original post, I see you made a distinction between presentation and representation, but these are both legitimate ways of translating said German word. I prefer to use presentation actually, but it is by no means the academic standard. So I would be in agreement with you insofar as "non-representational" means that art is presentational.
Quoting John
Yes, but in interpreting an artwork, one is not interpreting the Idea, for the experience of the Idea is entirely contingent. When one interprets an artwork one is rather doing so in terms of its historical context, the symbology present in it, etc - surface level interpretation, as it were.
Quoting John
This to me sounds like only a more vague and imprecise rephrasing of my position that art evokes the Ideas!
Quoting John
Well, neither does Schopenhauer permit any intellectual intuition of the sort Kant explicitly denies. The Ideas are perceived, not thought up and then alleged to exist. Schopenhauer is a nominalist with respect to concepts/abstractions: they do not afford knowledge of anything real. If the Ideas were merely concepts, then you would be right in pointing out their fictitiousness.
I do not honestly think I can be any clearer in what I mean. Aesthetic experiences have the quality of being timeless, of transporting oneself outside of oneself. This is simply axiomatic, though subject to numerous explanations by philosophers.
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
If one is transported out of time, then one is no longer thinking, since all thought occurs in time. Thought is nothing other than the formation of judgments, the subjects and predicates of which are composed of concepts. Hence, concepts cannot transport one outside of time.
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
Yes, that would explain things. I will not dispute your relativism here, as it would take us too far afield from the topic. Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
This is unclear to me, but note that I only inquired as to the number of ellipses you used, not that you used them at all. I don't mind them in and of themselves, but their frequency in your post struck me as odd. Though it does remind me of Céline 's writing, some of which I admire, so I suppose I can't complain too much.
Quoting Thorongil
OK... I sort of have a notion of what you mean. I'm not all too sure I'd limit aesthetic experiences to must having a notion of a quality of being timeless, just as all timeless experiences are not aesthetic, but I have more the feeling that this is your notion associated with aesthetic experience and I will grant you that without an argument. I have problems suggesting that this must be an associative quality for all people who have an aesthetic experience.
Indeed all thought occurs in time, but you could just as well state that all thought occurs in space, so are you willing to state that if we have any spatial quality to the experience of aesthetic it would not be a valid experience of aesthetics... as it seems as if you have implied that if we indeed have a temporal quality involved within an aesthetic experience it is not a valid aesthetic experience.
Anyway...
... the notion of 'transporting outside of oneself' is not a literal notion, but rather a metaphoric notion.
How exactly do you wish to make any confirmation that anyone has 'transported outside of themselves' much less state what the criteria is for such a metaphoric notion to literally occur?
Another anyway...
A concept...
[i]...a general notion or idea; conception.
...an idea of something formed by mentally combining all its characteristics or particulars; a construct.
...a directly conceived or intuited object of thought.[/i] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/concept
All of this is void and not present when one is having an aesthetic experience?
All of this is void and not present when one is having a notion of being 'outside oneself'?
I'm not all together sure how that's supposed to work...
... final anyway.
When I look at abstract expressionism or conceptual art or Dada or pop art or whatever label one gives art from ca.1860 to the present... I don't look to see concepts. The first and (honestly) most important criteria is does it appeal to me and not what statement does it make or what concepts it is here to proclaim.
In my experience, Rauschenberg or Johns speaks more to my senses and I have a far greater aesthetic experience than if I look at the works of Turner or Rembrandt, where all I can see is technique, process and concepts (for me endlessly boring concepts!).
In spite of the complete lack of aesthetic experience with Turner and Rembrandt I would not suggest that they did not produce art.
Indeed this is just a personal explanation of what is and is not the source of aesthetic experiences for me, but I fail to see that you have done more than make a case for yourself and your personal experiences, which I can understand, accept and respect... as long as it remains yours and is not made to be what others should or must adopt.
Truth is, I'm not too sure if you are stating your personal criteria or attempting to dictate criteria for everyone. Indeed you seem to have a very highly refined personal criteria, but it might surprise you that I do as well, but for me the source/catalyst of aesthetic experience is another from your source/catalyst.
I have no problem at all with differing source/catalyst. I have a problem with dictating what should or must be the source/catalyst for others.
That's my drift more or less...
Meow!
GREG
You might wish to be a bit careful with the word 'eine Vorstellung'.
It's loaded...
... it could also mean, an idea, a show, a presentation, an imagination, a vision, a notion, a concept, a conception and a perception, as well as a representation.
The German language has that tendency.
Context matters a lot; thus the relativity of the German language.
Meow!
GREG
*It's not magical philosophical language... believe me. I hear it everyday and there is nothing very philosophical about the vast majority of the use of this language. ;)
I think I was, which was in effect my point to John.
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
Well, there's nothing more for me to say on this, then. I take it to be a brute fact of aesthetic experience (though by no means the only fact); it's the raw data that needs to be explained by aestheticians.
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
No, I couldn't actually. If thoughts were in both time and space, then they would be physical objects, which they are not.
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
The former is impossible and the latter criteria are merely suggestive. In fact, part of what demarcates them as aesthetic experiences is their inability to be perfectly replicated, much like religious experiences. Aesthetics is therefore not a science.
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
My point was that concepts are not present when experiencing the Idea. Of course one can view art and make judgments about it.
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
Note that I have repeatedly said that literally anything can be a catalyst for experiencing the Ideas. If conceptual art does the trick for you, it doesn't defeat my position in the least. My disagreement is a matter of semantics on that score: I have a definition of art that it simply doesn't meet.
... but all thoughts are subject to experience and those experiences occurs in time and space... or are there thoughts that are not experiences?
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Quoting Thorongil
I have suggested http://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/68/bad-art/p1 that I agreed with McLuhan that art is anything (or what) you can get away with and religion is indeed no different:
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
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Quoting Thorongil
... and I have one in which it does meet.
Now what? ;)
Meow!
GREG
I don't think all experiences are in both space and time.
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
We're simply done here, I think. I would merely make the appeal that my definition most closely matches the etymology of the word and its usage, both historically speaking and at present.
I kind of have the feeling we're more of less done as well.
I'd only suggest that all experience takes place within the universe, the set of all sets. All of those are indeed happen within the context of time and space and are comprised of concepts that are indeed contingent upon time and space, regardless of how 'imaginative' one might think they are, so there is really nothing 'outside' the set of all sets (the universe)... as in 'outside the box' thinking or experiencing.
There is really no 'box', unless one wishes to limit the universe by virtue of personal preferences/conveniences, but this strays into other aspects of cosmology and such. I tend to remain rather consistent when it comes to this (right down to what is art or making soup), so I rule out all metaphysics from the git go, as self-justified narcissism via something that sounds creditable (meta- and -physics... which could be better stated as 'me'physics, as it's in the end all of the universe and all that there is out there is really about 'me'. More than a bit too idealistic, purposeful, willful and egotistical for my taste).
Indeed your definition fits to the etymological usage, but then again I wish not to tread toward an etymological fallacy in making an appeal to holding steadfast to the past nullifying adaptations and refinement.
I might say...
... "oh what a beautiful sunset", but that does not imply I believe the world is flat. :s
Anyway...
... all these definitions are works in progress for me and not static truths/absolutes.
Something tells me the 'marriage of our ideas' just won't happen, so we'd better call the whole thing off, but it's fun to rant about... :D
... philosophy just doesn't quite work like in the movies:
Neither of us are going to give up our ideas, but atleast we can entertain them a bit.
Cheers! ;)
Meow!
GREG
In my experience, Rauschenberg or Johns speaks more to my senses and I have a far greater aesthetic experience than if I look at the works of Turner or Rembrandt, where all I can see is technique, process and concepts (for me endlessly boring concepts!).[/quote]
Conceptual art is, using Thorongil's terms, "aesthetic" too. People have those "timeless" moments when standing in awe of an object which express an idea. Its presence, its aesthetic, what people see and feel, whether it be for blotches colour (e.g. a painting of red and orange blocks) themselves or because they are an aesthetic expressing some concept (non-representionally).
Description of art trends to falter because it often turns aesthetic into concept. When we are talking about art, most of do so on conceptual terms: we talks about what the painting represents, state information about how it affects or tell people off for filling to recognise the quality of a work. Our descriptions of art tend to be information rather than statements which provide insight to the presence of the object, the sensations it affects us with, the aesthetic which constituted the expression of an art work (nor matter how conceptual or non-reprsesentaional it might be). It makes it difficult to show what art to someone in any instance. Even for someone doing their best, giving insightful descriptions of how the aesthetics of a work affects them, it can all end-up in failure, for even the best description can suffer for registering as a "concept" of an aesthetic rather than an aesthetic experience itself.
In a situation where someone is actively looking to exclude a whole range of aesthetics from worth (which Thorongil does, so art can focus on a representational sublime), it becomes very tricky to describe art indeed. The very aesthetic you are trying to describe is one the other person thinks ought to wiped out. Such a pre-set prejudice tends to guard against any exploration of the aesthetic in question.
I hadn't thought of it as a "victory parade", but in any case....I don't think the question is ambiguous in the way you are suggesting, because representational art is usually taken to be representational precisely because it is taken to represent (in a purportedly unambiguous sense) something, anything.
Now, if you want to say that what is generally called 'representational art' is representational in the weaker sense that it merely presents something, then that will leave even less criteria for distinguishing it from what is generally called 'non-representational art'. I see no reason to think that "non-representational" art should be any less capable of 'presenting the Forms of Ideas' than "representational" art, and it might be thought to be even more suited to the task on the grounds that it is not hampered by embodying any fixed perspective on things.
I agree with you hare, I think, but I am not sure what you mean by saying that "the experience of the Idea is entirely contingent".
Yes, and I think that such evocations are always "vague and imprecise" precisely because they cannot be precisely formulated. I think evocations can be powerful and highly affective even to the point of being life-changing, despite their lack of precise content, or more importantly, precisely because of their lack of precise content. Having said this I think that life changing experiences of the mystical are usually associated with metaphysical ideas that have been culturally inculcated. That the mystical experience, per se, does not consist in precise content is borne out by the fact that it is cross-culturally ubiquitous, and it is the powerful affective character of such experiences that is the common element.
I don't follow your reasoning here; if you believe, and/or Schopenhauer believes, there can be no intellectual intuition of the Ideas, then surely they can be thought only as "concepts/abstractions"; and thus could not be taken "to afford knowledge of anything real", I say this because they could not be understood to afford knowledge of themselves, since they are taken to be 'the most real'.
The only other possibility would be that they could be "perceived" as you say, but this is certainly not Plato's idea. Does Schopenhauer think, or do you think, that the ideas can be perceived via the senses? Because it seems the only other kind of perception that could be meant is precisely the kind of intellectual perception (intuition) that you say that Schopenhauer agrees with Kant in denying.
"From one angle I find works by Rothko and Pollock visually pleasing, but from other angles they can seem empty and dull. They attract considerable loathing."
Rothko's
It's vertical, it is like a portrait, it is about 81x66 inches, a huge work. Its hugeness draws the observer into the work, you get lost in it, like a surreal figure less landscape. The paint seems to want to go beyond the canvas.... away from the white. The yellow is optimistic and the red passionate, the black in the middle is like a land mass separating these two seas of color. The orange is the surrender.
Rothko was trying to connect with people on the plane of feeling, movement here is in chunks of emotion.
I'm saying there is no single, perfectly replicable method one can follow that will, by necessity, result in experiencing an Idea. My position is only that art as I have defined it tends to bring about such a result more than other things, and for the reason I gave earlier.
Quoting John
I think he would be obliged to answer your question in the affirmative, and so would I.
I'm still not clear exactly what you mean by "experiencing an Idea". Do you mean something like 'grasping the form of a thing, in a kind of geometrical sense? Or something more like 'feeling a sense of the numinous'? Or maybe both together?
For Plato the highest form, the 'master form' is the Good. Do you think works of art can bring about 'an experience of the Good'?
So, it is just by virtue of its sheer formal arrangement that a work of art or a natural landscape of human face might reveal an Idea? Would it not also have to do with feelings and meanings inherent in the conformation and attendant dispositions or comportments of the human body?
If you want to say the former then I can't see how that would not be a case of conceiving some kind of purely spiritual or intellectual (magical) relation between certain patterns (conceived as kinds of esoteric symbols) and a disembodied intellect; in other words this would seem to be coming back to the idea of intellectual intuition.
No, I wouldn't describe it in these ways. Perhaps the key to understanding what I mean is to consider that such an experience is will-less. One's will has been temporarily quieted when having such an experience, such that one contemplates an object free from the ordinary dimensions of experience (those of time, space, and causality). One no longer views the object in relation to one's will but rather as an object qua object, and the notion of "timeless objects" has traditionally been associated with Plato's Ideas/Forms, hence the name.
Quoting John
No, for unlike Plato, Schopenhauer doesn't think there are Ideas for abstract concepts such as goodness, courage, beauty, etc.
Quoting John
No, I don't think so. As I said before, it's by virtue of the removed nature of art from reality proper that enables, or encourages at least, the contemplation of an Idea.
Quoting John
Maybe. I don't know.
OK, that's interesting that you should say that, because the specific aim of the Abstract expressionists was a purely formalist one (under the tutelage of Clement Greenburg): to present works that invited the viewer to see them precisely as the formally realized objects that they are.
They were certainly not successful in your case apparently. Is there any good reason to believe that it will be the same objects which lead different people to an apprehension of Ideas?
In lieu of me going back to read the whole thread over again can you outline your argument again, in the context of the idea (I presume you are espousing) that there are objective qualities possessed by certain art works such that they must lead all (presumably suitably open) viewers to an experience of timeless Ideas?
No, not "must;" I have never been that forceful. Here is what I said earlier, ironically in reply to you:
"The Ideas are not represented in art, but rather experienced by means of art. Art is, as it were, a reliable catalyst for experiencing them. As I said in an earlier post, literally anything can inspire contemplation of the Ideas, but art rather uniquely does this better than most things. The primary way it does this, I would submit, is because, as a representation of the world, a piece of art is one step removed from our ordinary experience of the world. In this way, we do not react the same way to a painting of a man as we do to an actual man. The latter involves all kinds of subtle, instinctual, and emotive responses, whereas the former does not or need not. The painting allows one to intellectually contemplate the man free from the constraints of embodied interaction, and in this way, uncover the Idea behind him."