Тopic 3. Culture and Art

 

Main themes of Western Cultural studies and Art theory constitute a particular tradition which has generated, modified and criticized its own contents, whilst assimilating and remaining open to ideas and discourses external to itself.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Theodor Adorno could define art as the process through which the individual gains freedom by externalizing himself, in contrast to the philistine “who craves art for what he can get out of it.” Today, it is nearly impossible to find public statements that do not recruit art and culture either to better social conditions through the creation of multicultural tolerance and civic participation or to spur economic growth through urban cultural development projects and the concomitant proliferation of museums for cultural tourism, epitomized by the increasing number of Guggenheim franchises.

The notion of art or culture as ideology, for example, may have a central place within Marxist art theory, yet, even while being criticized, it has also formed an important reference point for other theories about the power of representations, including feminism, discourse theory, Post-structuralism and Deconstruction – all of which can themselves be seen to be interrelated.

Thus we can meet a variety of important critical and sometimes sceptical views on the nature and possibility of art theory that have developed relatively recently. The earliest is a view to be found in the ‘New Art History’ of the 1970s and early 1980s. A particular target of this ‘revisionist’ phase was the view, deriving from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetics (and from certain readings of Kant and Schopenhauer in particular), which was central to much modernist art

theory, that art provided an aesthetic experience characterized by disinterest, which made it autonomous from the practical interests of life, or that the work of art somehow embodied an autonomous realm of value.

In opposing these formalistic approaches, much Marxist and feminist theory sought to show how art served to misrepresent the class and gender interests it reproduced as objective or ‘natural’, and hence how the notion of autonomy itself was part of an ideology that occluded or naturalized this repressive effect.

In similar ways, psychoanalysis was used to show how art sought to convert aspects of a masculine way of seeing, rooted in developmental anxiety, into power. Varieties of semiotics supported such readings of art and their implications for art theory. The critique of autonomy, especially, found further support from developments in discourse theory with its idea that art (like any other modes or genres of representation) is a vehicle through which power reproduces itself by regulating what can and cannot be represented, and how.

Since such critiques have proven very powerful, especially in combination (as in theories of the gaze that draw simultaneously upon psychoanalysis and Foucauldian theories of power/knowledge), part of the aim of this book is to present some of their developments. They have undoubtedly resulted in a profound change in contemporary theories of art, and perhaps also in an idea, foundational to the discipline of visual culture, that considerations of aesthetic quality are

largely irrelevant to the understanding of visual representations. Nevertheless, even the mature forms of revisionist criticism leave problems and issues concerning their own theoretical coherence and methodological probity, some of which this book has sought to consider. The ‘theory’ that looked as though it occupied a special, metatheoretical, position in relation to traditional art theory is, in other words, itself the subject of critical scrutiny in this book.

The next phase of the sceptical examination of art theory can perhaps be identified with the arrival, sometime in the mid-1980s, of fully fledged postmodernism, one of whose landmarks was Victor Burgin’s apocalyptically titled The End of Art Theory (1986). A central claim of this was that traditional art theory, and hence the very notion of art, could be traced to the progressively individuated and institutionalized ‘grand narratives’ of an Enlightenment project which

had attempted, but failed, to establish legitimating principles grounding science, ethics and aesthetics.

Theory now was conceived as situated and more piecemeal, as responsive to the interests of particular groups and as necessarily fragmented or activated by conflicting forces. The idea that postmodernism marks a catastrophic break with traditional art theory is very strong, and is recapitulated in recent interventions in art theory, notably in Arthur Danto’s After the End of Art (1997). Here, the claim is made that the ‘atmosphere of theory’, which once lent a characteristic seriousness and unity to the notion of art, irrevocably changed or dissipated towards the end of the twentieth century, largely in response to what was perceived as Warhol’s (and before that, Duchamp’s) challenge to the very idea of art.

There is no denying that such ideas have profoundly affected our own ideas about what art can be. But the absence of grand theory of the sort rejected by postmodern thought does not entail that theoretical reflection on art is no longer possible at all. It is by no means inevitable, therefore, that thinking about art in the future is destined to be without any significant relationship to the family of practices and theories that forms the bulk of different cultural studies.

During the second half of the XXth century the theoretical side of the relationship between theory and practice became increasingly dominant: a great deal of contemporary artwork is meaningless and even valueless without direct recourse to some theoretical context, signalled through titles, catalogue descriptions, critical essays or other textual supplements. Although there were various institutional and educational factors influencing this state of affairs, one in particular was the radical dislocation of art from other social and practical interests during the processes of modernity.

Thus other, more central, forms of visual production, such as cinema and advertising, which are more directly concerned with entertainment or the processes of commodification, were culturally separated from High Art. Of course, the meanings and communicative strategies of these other areas of work can be theorized, as they are within the broader disciplines of Cultural or Media Studies, and these disciplines themselves share some common ground with art theory. But the role of theory in those cases has more to do with disclosing what is hidden, the ‘doubleness’ or even duplicity of the image, than with relating the thought which the work itself may be said to manifest to some wider understanding of its manner and means of representation. (The interaction between all these forms of visual culture is itself a complex matter, since most contemporary art, even whilst maintaining the cultural hierarchy, intertrades with popular culture).

In other words the question “Can the art still exist? ” means “What the art can still express? ”

During the early twentieth century, influential theories in philosophical aesthetics deepened the Romantic perspective by identifying personalized expression as the very foundation of art (see works by Croce, Dewey, Collingwood). Artistic creation was conceived as a process of discovering a proper form to “express” a particular emotion, intuition, or concept. Form itself would do more than merely transfer or translate – this, in contradistinction to what might have been said of Raphael and his assistants, that their form had transferred Masaccio’s concept to a new site. Specific to a medium as much as to an emotion, artistic form in its modern conception had the force of origination; it actualized emotional or ideational content that otherwise attained no significant presence.

Artistic expression thus entailed a reciprocity of medium and message: “There is no way of expressing the same feeling in two different media… the idea is had as an idea only in so far as it is expressed [in a medium or representational form]” (Collingwood, R. G. The Principles of Art, Oxford University Press, 1938, pp. 245, 249). The definition of art as individually expressive form implied that any standardization of the medium would limit the visualization of thought and feeling.

To regulate form was to regulate mind and spirit. During the nineteenth century, and even more during the twentieth, this notion presented a serious challenge to instruction within schools of art. Rigorous training in conventional technique was tempered by fears that as the master’s controlling hand strengthened, the pupil’s expressive originality weakened. At a time when universal education and a common literacy were being encouraged as features of social progress, artists were becoming antisocial; even when schooled, they received praise for keeping their distance from the crowd and from each other.

When expression takes precedence over mere representation, historians and critics resort to asking what, in fact, is being expressed. The answer is the triad of constitutive elements to which one have referred: a work of art expresses its model, its creator the artist, and the picture or work itself, that is, an act of picturing within a given medium (the “pictorial” factor). Boundaries between the three elements of expressive content are uncertain and endlessly negotiable.

1) Art expresses its model. This might be a person posing in the artist’s studio, a landscape viewed outdoors, or an imaginary scene derived from some past experience. It might also be an antecedent work, perhaps executed in the same medium, as when a painter copies or pastiches an admired painting. Even in the latter case perfect doubling does not occur: any representation will either lack some feature of its model, exaggerate it, or add a feature, becoming expressive of a certain differential or transformation as it creates something never before known. Artists tend to internalize a model through an act of representation, converting it into what can be regarded as a motif or pictorial theme. A motif itself can function as a model, a pattern of discovery that guides an artist’s movement within a medium (in the way that a current can guide, as well as resist, a swimmer’s direction).

2) Art expresses the artist. Through its transformation of the model, art expresses the vision, the emotions, the very character of the artist. This factor is emphasized in styles specifically labeled Expressionist or Expressionistic (those of Edvard Munch, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Willem de Kooning). An artist’s manner of representing a model is analogous to an idiosyncratic gesture that reveals personality. By this reasoning, a painting of a model is always also a painting or representation of the person who makes the painting; it is of, as well as by, the artist. To follow are two nineteenth-century statements of this principle (both of which happen to address the issue of expression by using figured, metaphoric “expression”): “A portrait is a model complicated by an artist”; “a work of art is a personality, an individuality... a combination of a human being, the variable element [artist], and nature, the fixed element [model]” (Baudelaire).

3) Art expresses the “pictorial” – the emergent material and physical character of the very work the artist is creating. Any medium offers a certain resistance that must, to some extent, be overcome. So the artist works against, as well as with, the medium of representation (as if it were an internal model, a current for the swimmer, as opposed to the kind of external model commonly thought of as “subject matter”).

The process of working with and against the medium, both a conflict and a collaboration, again expresses character: not only that of the artist, but also the material character of the work, its form and potential. At any historical moment, a medium or practice will seem to have a certain expressive, communicative range, to be known only as a result of artists having engaged that medium. The proof of a medium is in its practice and products. How subjective, then, is this pictorial factor? Consider that artists who concentrate on pictorial relationships become ever more sensitive to the physical properties of painting. To draw a line or to color a shape seems to release a tension between what is seen (externally, as if objectively) and what is felt (internally, as if subjectively). A thing seen can be “felt” when drawn or painted in a way that gives it a desirable form, even if pleasing only to the individual artist. This might explain why the act of representation is such a satisfying exercise – it crosses the barrier between outside and inside, perceived sensation and sensed emotion. But a new and different kind of tension is generated by this same act.

An artist becomes particularly aware that his or her hand moves within a bounded area (the drawing or painting surface), responding not only to the thing observed and its imagined aesthetic potential, but also to the restrictions imposed by the specific pictorial format. This second tension is “pictorial”; its spontaneous resolution conveys an expressiveness of its own, as subjective and open to interpretation as any other.

There is a fourth factor to consider, sometimes difficult to distinguish from the other three: art simply conveys, or expresses, expressiveness. In this respect, art is self-reflexive and perhaps, in a nineteenth-century sense, insincere.

Although artists committed to being expressive struggle to be sincere (honest, direct), they do so by design, explicitly intending to communicate sincerity as a value. Through their professionalism, they distance themselves from any uncontrolled, “sincere” form of expression; they work to give the effect of an emotion perhaps never directly experienced. Would artists be able to avoid trapping themselves as much as their audience, as they artificially induce their own emotion? Would they be able to bypass their own professional skills and conventions? Such was the aim of the modern art of individual expression.

During the era of modern art artists have become increasingly conscious of distinctions between natural expression (signifying nature or some other model), personal expression (signifying the self), and pictorial expression (signifying a material process of creation). Whether working in modes of representation or pure abstraction, they have come to favor the pictorial as a path to the personal.

The work of art itself is hardly mentioned by F. Nietzsche. What is constantly affirmed is the art-creating state which is as significant for the creator as the observer. This tendency finds literal interpretation not only in Expressionism but in later twentieth-century artistic phenomena such as performance art.

According to Nietzsche Art is not only a ‘cult of the untrue’ but is what ensures that ‘as an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable for us’ (Nietzsche F., The Gay Science. 1974, p. 163). Nietzsche’s remorseless attack on dualisms aligned truth and error along a single continuum whereby the falseness of a judgement would not necessarily be an objection to it, if it is still life-enhancing or even life-preserving: ‘We possess art lest we perish of the truth ’, reads one of the most celebrated maxims in The Will to Power (Nietzsche F., The Will to Power, p. 435). Similarly, the celebration of falsehood must not be understood as escapism: Is art a consequence of dissatisfaction with reality? Or an expression of gratitude for happiness enjoyed?

In a case of Modern or Modernist art we can notice that it is an intentional act and object of a mind that would know its self. The work of art comes in place of a self’s yearning for knowledge of itself and though it cannot be reduced to the intention that brought it into

being, and certainly not to the artist’s statement as to what brought it into being, the process or activity of making and understanding it maintains itself as a process of self-consciousness.

The intentional act that makes a modern or Modernist work of art is not an inner image that can be exactly externalized, reproduced or re-presented in practice according to a concept or description or a set of legal instructions. Pictorial meaning is conveyed in sensual experience. The artist makes the work of art to effect an experience and meaning in the work’s beholder. That experience and meaning must be made to try to match the intention that motivated the artist to make the work of art. The artist, of course, is the first beholder of his work.

As the artist makes the work he must continually match his experience and interpretation of what he is doing and bringing into being against the intention that motivated him to begin making what he is making. He sees, feels, smells, hears and explains to himself what he is doing and tries to make sure that the experience – especially the visual and tactile experience – he has and the interpretation that he makes of the work of art while he is making it is attuned to the intention that was acted on when he began making it. Sense perception or experience and cognition are in an interdependent relation with intention in the process of making a work of art which is one of continuous adjustment and readjustment between the intention that motivated it and what is being brought into being, between what was desired and what is achieved. As Richard Wollheim said “The artist is not necessarily the best interpreter of his work,... the spectator has a legitimate role to play in the organization of what he perceives”. (Richard Wollheim, The Work of Art as Object, p. 112)

So the interpretation of a modern or Modernist work of art implies understanding the intention that brought it to its mode of being by attending first and foremost to the relations that make its material substantiality what it is and which exist not in themselves, as if the work of art is a natural object, but for the artist and, because of and after him, for us.

Here, for example, are three attempts to characterize the way intention occupies its place within the act or object: (a) Wittgenstein, 1953, 644: ‘I am not ashamed of what I did then, but of the intention which I had. – And didn’t the intention lie also in what I did? ’; (b) J. Derrida (1976) Of Grammatology, trans. by G. C. Spivak, Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 243: ‘But in spite of that declared intention, Rousseau’s discourse lets itself be constrained by a complexity which always has the form of the supplement of or from the origin. His declared intention is not annulled by this but rather inscribed within a system’ (originally published 1967); and (c) T. W. Adorno (1984) Aesthetic Theory, trans. by C. Lenhardt, Routledge & Kegan Paul, p. 217: ‘[intention] plays the role of a subjective moving force that ends up being submerged in the work’ (originally published 1970).

It is important to speak here about “dialogical” function of art (and culture itself). A Russian scholar M. Bakhtin developed a notion “dialogue” or “dialogism” in his The Dialogical Imagination. Concentration on the carnivalesque or the dialogic has tended to skew the adaptation of Bakhtin’s work by scholars in a wide range of scholarly disciplines. Among the disciplines in which scholars have fruitfully engaged his ideas are: communication and media studies, composition, cultural studies, education and educational theory, ethics, film and television, law and critical legal studies, linguistics and philosophy of language, literature, multicultural studies, philosophy, political theory, psychology and psychoanalysis, religion, sociology, theater and performance, and urban studies. Curiously, art historians, art theorists, and critics have been slow to adapt his concepts to analyses of visual culture and the visual arts.

After M. Bakhtin the realm of ethical action differs from the cognitive, because here one encounters conflict over moral duty or obligation, but it cannot be separated from cognitive functioning. Consequently, neither cognition nor action alone can provide a foundation for philosophy. For Bakhtin, the aesthetic sphere is fundamentally different from the other two, because in artistic creation reality and life interpenetrate with art. As he wrote: Aesthetic activity does not create a reality that is wholly new. Unlike cognition and performed action, which create nature and social humanity, art celebrates, adorns, and recollects… It enriches and completes them, and above all else it creates the concrete intuitive unity of these two worlds. It places man in nature… it humanizes nature and naturalizes man. (Bakhtin M., Art and Answerability: The Early Essays of M. M. Bakhtin, trans. by Vadim Liapunov and Kenneth Brostrom, Michael Holquist, (ed.), University of Texas Press 1990, pp. 278–9).

Bakhtin’s approach to aesthetics is thus unique. It is based not only on categories such as the aesthetic (the aesthetic attitude or aesthetic object) or aesthetic values (truth, goodness, or beauty), but also on the phenomenology of self–other relations, relations that are embodied in actual bodies, in space and time. In some of his essays

Bakhtin treated traditional aesthetic categories such as detachment, empathy, isolation, and the aesthetic object, as well as theories of art and the relationship of art and morality. But in discussing each of these categories and topics, he focused on the unique human being, located spatially and temporally and thus having a particular relationship to all other persons, objects, and events in the world. An

analysis of Bakhtin’s writing demonstrates that he was compelled to understand the nature of these interrelationships.

Humans engage in aesthetic activity in order to express and to shape perception and experience. Bakhtin called such activity “authoring, ” another name for creative activity. He did not limit his interpretation of authorship to literary texts, but he saw this as a process involving other persons and nature. Although he wrote much about literature, he occasionally mentioned works of art. To author, in Bakhtin’s vocabulary, is to create.

Bakhtin made interrelated assertions about theory and action. On the one hand, theory cannot provide the basis for responsible action in the world. Immersion in the theoretical too often takes place at the expense of the everyday practical realm. Theory does not translate directly or easily into daily life and experience. On the other hand, a specific act or deed (delo or postupok) does provide a basis for creating an adequate orientation in life. Where theoretical arenas do not provide a standpoint for determining the meaning of life, specific acts do.

Bakhtin’s ideas – answerability, dialogue, monologism, polyphony, outsideness, chronotope, the carnivalesque, unfinalizability, and heteroglossia, to name but a few – not only offer scholars categories for aesthetics, but also for analyzing visual art. Whether describing the breakdown of traditional genres and the reemergence of new narrative structures in contemporary art or creating taxonomies for interpreting works of art in relation to one another, his ideas are enormously generative. In what follows, I indicate possibilities and directions for such analysis by referring primarily to painting, but Bakhtin’s concepts are widely applicable to other media within the visual arts.

Any discussion of the usefulness of Bakhtin’s ideas must begin with a brief description of his understanding of the phenomenology of the self and self–other relationships, which he articulated with the concepts of answerability and the dialogic. Unlike some of his contemporaries such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Henri Bergson, Bakhtin’s goal was not to create a moral or philosophical system. Instead, most of his essays are predicated on the presupposition that the human being is the center around which all action in the real world, including art, is organized. In his writing, the ‘I’ and the ‘other’ are the fundamental categories of value that make all action and creativity possible, as in the work of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas.

In Bakhtin’s early essays this sense of the relationship of self and other was expressed with the concept of answerability. Art and life answer to each other much as human beings answer each other’s needs and inquiries in time and space.

Answerability was his way of naming the fact that art, and hence the creative activity of the artist, is always related, answerable, to life and lived experience. For him, the idea that we are answerable, indeed obligated, through our deeds is the basis of the architectonic structure of the world and the basis of artistic creativity.

Thus, his interpretation of creativity emphasized the profound moral obligation we bear toward others. Such obligation is never solely theoretical, but is an individual’s concrete response to actual persons in specific situations. Because we do not exist alone, as isolated consciousnesses, our creative work is always answering the other. Answerability contains the moral imperative that the artist remain engaged with life, that the artist answer for life.

At every point Bakhtin insisted upon obvious ethical aspects of creativity. Bakhtin developed a more linguistic interpretation of this process in his book on Dostoevsky, where he began writing about dialogue and the dialogic. The concept of dialogue lends itself to facile application, because everyone has a common-sense understanding of what it is. An individual talks. Another person listens and responds.

In a work of art, an artist enters into dialogue (in actual, historical, or mythological time) and expresses something about a place, person, or event. Bakhtin, however, meant more that this. Dialogue refers to the fact that every utterance is by nature dialogic. An utterance can never be abstract, but must occur between two persons: speaker and listener, creator and audience, artist and viewer. It is always directed at somebody in a living, concrete, unrepeatable set of circumstances. For instance, a Russian icon is directed toward the Orthodox believer. The paintings of Claude Monet may be interpreted as a dialogue with his contemporaries, artists such as Auguste Renoir, Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, James Whistler, and John Singer Sargent, and with his critics and dealers. Richard Long’s environmental and site-specific installations may be interpreted as a profound dialogue with the physical environment. This range of dialogues shows that the self is never autonomous, but always exists in a nexus of formative relationships with persons, places, or events that are reflected in an artwork. Dialogue, therefore, is epistemological. Only through it do we know ourselves, other persons, and the world. Working with paint and canvas, with chisels and stone, with earth and sticks, or only with voice and body in a solo performance piece, an artist engages in a dialogue with perception and shares knowledge about the world.

Works of art therefore may express not only a profoundly answerable and dialogic relationship with persons and with the environment, but they may also be interpreted in relation to time, duration, and change. Where dialogue describes the process and practice of communication and relationship among selves or objects, the concept of the chronotope describes the time/space nexus in which life exists and creativity is possible (Bakhtin M., The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, Michael Holquist, (ed.), trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press 1981, pp. 84–258).

The idea of the chronotope is fairly easy to understand. There is

no experience outside of space and time, both of which always change. Subjectivity dictates that an artist create objects that are always constituted differently. The fact that all conditions of experience are determined by space and time, which are themselves variable, means that every artwork exists in a unique chronotope. Within any situation there may be many different chronotopes, values, and beliefs, and these derive from actual social relations. We also might examine chronotopic motifs that function as condensed reminders of particular kinds of time and space. For instance, images of roads, of structures such as churches, castles, or bridges, and of elements in the natural world such as trees or mountains all have metaphorical resonances. Each image is saturated with a specific sense of time and history and carries all of the specificity associated with a particular faith, family, journey, or environment.

To speak of chronotopic motifs offers another way of articulating how images carry symbolic meanings. In the end, the chronotope helps us to explain the fact that everything happens not only within a nexus of answerable dialogues, but also that no artifact of culture ever exists outside of a particular historical place and time.

Unfinalizability is another one of the most significant core concepts in Bakhtin’s writing, and it appears in a variety of contexts. Unfinalizability may help us to articulate complex answers to questions about particular works of art. When is a work finished? Can it ever be truly finished? When is a critical perspective or audience reception complete? The fact that sculptures such as the Samothracian Nike or paintings such as Leonardo’s Mona Lisa have continued to generate scholarly and public interest for centuries verifies the central insight of Bakhtin’s concept.

In Bakhtin’s formulation, the sense of freedom and openness that is encompassed by the idea of unfinalizability applies not only to works of literature and art, but it is also an intrinsic condition of our daily lives. Such creativity is ubiquitous and unavoidable, and, as noted earlier, it should not be separated from one’s responsibility toward others and toward the world. What can ever be fully finalized? There always is a tentative quality to one’s work, one’s action, and to

life itself. Unfinalizability has at least two distinct levels: the ways we need others in order to finalize the self; and the ultimate unfinalizability of all things, events, and persons.

Art and life are ultimately open-ended. Even though a person’s life is finalized in death, that person’s work lives on, to be extended and developed by others, an insight we certainly know vis-а-vis important historical artworks. The creative process, too, is unfinalizable, except insofar as an artist says, somewhat arbitrarily, “I stop here.” Precisely because it is always open to change and transformation, artistic work can be a model for the possibility of change in the larger world outside the studio. Indeed, unfinalizability gives us a way to speak about the problems of representing the changing world through the artistic lens of our diverse and ever-changing subjectivities.

Bakhtin’s writing anticipated many contemporary concerns; and it predates a variety of movements within literary, visual, and cultural studies, such as Neo-Historicism, Poststructuralism, and Postmodernism. This is a key to his ongoing significance within many scholarly disciplines. In late essays and notes written in the 1970s before he died, Bakthin touched on numerous issues that need further interpretation by art historians and theorists of art. For example, his ideas about creative understanding and the uniqueness of the humanities, as well as his broad interpretation of genres, could be usefully developed.