Monday, November 29, 2010
Friday, October 1, 2010
Homework 222
Art & Discontent
Theory at the Millennium
Thomas McEvilley
DOCUMENTEXT
McPHERSON & COMPANY
"Thirteen Ways of
Looking at a Blackbird"
Everything we might say about an artwork that is not neutral description of
aesthetic properties is an attribution of content. (Even value judgments, insofar
as they reflect what Althusserian critics call "visual ideology, are implicit
attributions of content.) If there is no such thing as neutral description, then all
statements about art works involve attributions of content, whether acknowledged
or not. There are many possible ways to sort these things out; one is on the
model of geography—what types of content arise from this or that location in the
artwork?
1. Content that arises from the aspect of the artwork that is
understood as representational. This type of content is widely regarded
as the least problematical; ironically, this very assumption lies at the heart of a
tangled problem. We tend to feel that representation works by a recognizable
element of objective resemblance, yet it seems more accurate to say that what we
experience as representation is, like aesthetic taste, a culturally conditioned habit
response not involving objective resemblance. In fact, it is difficult if not
impossible to say what would constitute objective resemblance. And in reverse,
the conviction of objective resemblance habituated in our pictorial tradition seems
to exercise control over our perception of nature. The pictorial tradition,
presented to us as representation of nature, has remade our perception of
nature to conform with the conventions of pictures (as Goodman and others have
demonstrated in their critiques of representation and, especially, of the tradition
of perspectival drawing). The resemblance we seem to see between pictures and
nature does not result from the fact that art imitates nature, but from the fact that
our perception of nature imitates our perception of art. Seen thusly, just as it
seems we can't think anything that our language can't formulate, so it seems we
can't see anything that our pictorial tradition does not include or imply.
Representation, then, especially two-dimensional representation, is not an
objective imitation, but a conventional symbolic system which varies from culture
to culture. What "looks like" nature to an Australian aborigine looks like symbols
to us, and vice versa. Virtually every culture has a tradition of representation
which it sincerely regards as based on resemblance. Faced with a painting of the
Battle of Waterloo, we seem to recognize horses, weapons, warriors, and so on;
what we are in fact recognizing are our conventional ways of representing horses,
weapons, warriors, and so on. The fact that it is specifically the Battle of Waterloo
must come from the next level of content.
2. Content arising from verbal supplements supplied by the artist.
Duchamp's famous remark that the most important thing about a painting is its
title points to a weakness in the "purely optical" theory of art. Artists frequently
issue verbal supplements in an attempt to control the interpretation of their
works, and even the most optical of critics cannot help but be influenced by them.
In reference to a painting of horses, and weapons, and warriors, for example, the
title "The Battle of Waterloo" injects a specific content arising not from optical
features but from words. Abstract and reductionist art, as much as
representational, has been dependent on content supplied in this way. For
example, it would be virtually impossible (as Harold Rosenberg once remarked)
to distinguish the Minimal from the Sublime without such verbal supplements as
Barnett Newman's cabalistic titles, the published interviews with Frank Stella and
Donald Judd, and so on. Robert Smithson's essays have controlled the
interpretation of his works, as Yves Klein's essays have of his. This quality goes
back, really, to the beginnings of art: to Pheidias' identification of a certain nude
male sculpture as Zeus rather than, say, Poseidon or Apollo, to the texts
accompanying Egyptian tomb paintings, to the shaman's explanatory song in
front of his paintings. It is as important today as it ever was.
3. Content arising from the genre or medium of the artwork. This
type of content shifts as ambient cultural forces shift. In the 1960s in America, for
example, a contentual dichotomy between painting and sculpture arose. Painting
came to imply a lack of direct involvement in experience, an absorption in indirect,
distanced preoccupations. Sculpture, on the other hand, was understood, even
when representational, as a real presence of objecthood, since it occupied the
same space the viewer occupied, the space of embodied life. From this ethical
dichotomy arose much of the dynamic of the art of the 1960s and 70s. The
radical new genres were associated with sculpture, performance being called
"living sculpture," installations "environmental sculpture," and so on. Painting was
associated with the old values of convention, rather than actuality. For an artist to
choose to work in oils on canvas was seen as a reactionary political
statement—whereas in the 1950s oil and canvas has signified freedom,
individuality, and existentialism. This dynamic was at the root of the great
acceleration, in the 1960s and '70s, of the project of sculpturizing the painting,
of asserting it as an object in real space rather than as a window into illusionistic
space. Three-dimensional objects were added to canvases to link the
representational surface to sculptural presence. Shaped canvases were similarly
motivated. Explorations of ways to combine colors without producing a figureground
relationship were another aspect of the effort to produce objects that,
while recognizably paintings, were not compromised by suggestions of
representation. The content inherent in the media and genres had attained
political and cultural significance that asserted itself alongside the significance of
the art objects themselves.
History can provide countless examples of this type of content, not least the
distinction between popular and elitist media (in ancient Greece, for example, the
vase painting versus the sculpture) and that between male and female media (for
example, in neolithic societies which restricted pottery-making and basketmaking,
that is, vessel-making in general, to women's groups).
4. Content arising from the material of which the artwork is made.
Within the category of sculpture in the 1960s and '70s, an artist working marble
representationally was at one level making a statement opposed to that of the
artist working with industrial I-beams or fire. Traditional art materials, industrial
materials, esoteric high-tech materials, absurdist materials (like Ed Ruscha's
chocolate), neoprimitive materials (like Eric Orr's bone and blood), pantheistic
materials (Klein's fire, and so on), deceptive self-disguising materials (plastic that
looks like plaster, wood prepared to look like stone)—all these decisions by the
artist carry content quite as much as form. They are judgment pronouncements
that the art viewer picks up automatically without necessarily even thinking of
them as content. They are statements of affiliation to, or alienation from, certain
areas of cultural tradition; as, say, the use of industrial I-beams represents a
celebration, or at least an acceptance, of urban industrial culture, while the use of
marble or ceramic suggests nostalgia for the pre-Industrial Revolution world.
5. Content arising from the scale of the artwork. The New Kingdom
Egyptian custom of sculpting pharaohs and their consorts much larger than life
(as at Abu-Simbel) is an obvious assertion of political content, a portrayal of the
hereditary monarchy and its representatives as awesomely given, like those parts
of nature—sea, sky, desert, mountain—beside which ordinary human power and
stature seem trivial. Such channels of content are not objective and absolute but
culturally shifting: it is possible to conceive a society that would associate unusual
smallness with special power or efficacy. In the Roman empire an emperor was
sculpted during his lifetime about life-size; after death and deification, about twice
life-size. Obviously, decisions of scale have formal significance; their contentual
significances should be equally obvious. John Berger, among others, has pointed
out that the portability of the easel painting was a signifier of private property.
The increased scale of paintings from Barnett Newman onward suggests a more
public arena—a society dominated by large institutions rather than by private
individuals. The huge scale of many paintings today functions in part as a denial
of transience through an implied reconstitution of the architectural support. Scale
always has content, yet we read it so quickly that we hardly notice.
6. Content arising from the temporal duration of the artwork. T h e
Platonist view that underlies the masterpiece tradition was stated by the Roman
poet Seneca: "Vita brevis est, ars longa": life is short, art long. The artist's work,
that is, was expected to outlive him or her. This hope went back at least to
Sappho (6th century BC), who said that her poems would bring her immortality.
The time-reality in which the artwork lived was not precisely historical time: its
proper time dimension was a posterity conceived as a mingling of historical time
and eternity—the artwork would survive through historical time forever, like
Sappho's undying roses. With it something of the artist's Soul (its trace at least)
also became immortal. In terms of Greek philosophy, the artwork has crossed a
metaphysical boundary like that at the level of the moon, below which things die,
above which, not. Great art, in other words, was regarded as having captured
something of deity—as Quintilian said of Pheidias' Zeus. That divine spark inside
the artwork is its immortal Soul, which enables it, like the magical ritual, to
penetrate through to higher metaphysical realms and to act as a channel to
conduct higher powers downward while yet keeping them pure. We are all familiar
with this view. Even in comedies, artists seek immortality. One silly poet of the
Roman Empire is survived only by a scrap of verse saying that his oeuvre would
outlast the ages.
This view of artworks goes back to times when they were sanctified objects made
for use in rituals. It is primitive magic plain and simple, which ritually abolishes
historical time. It typified Egyptian tomb art, which portrayed the places and
things of eternity and was itself magically equivalent to them; it goes back
probably to those Magdalenian paintings in the distant depths of caves, beyond
the reach of the changes of night and day. Yet despite the extreme primitiveness
of its beginnings, this theory of art came into Romantic Europe whole, and has
survived to the present day. Goethe quite as much as Propertius—and Dylan
Thomas as much as Goethe—expected to be singing his poems in a chariot
driven by the Muses toward Heaven.
Works with exaggeratedly durable materials—such as the granite in which the
Egyptians carved pharaohs—participate in this Platonic daydream of
transcending the web of cause and effect here below. The idea, of course, is
integral to the formalist Modern tradition, which is throughout solidly founded on
primitive thoughts and intentions. It is why the artwork is held to have no relation
to socio-economic affairs: it has transcended conditionality and, by capturing a
spark of the divine, has become an ultimate. Signs of this metaphysic virtually
ooze from the works made on its assumption, which can be detected not only by
the durability of their materials but also by the pomposity that surrounds their
aesthetic displays.
Just as clearly, an opposite metaphysic is asserted by works made in
deliberately ephemeral modes or materials—a metaphysic affirming flux and
process and the changing sense of selfhood. The obsessive expectation of
posterity is linked with the belief in Soul and constitutes, in effect, a claim that one
has a Soul. Works affirming flux involve the opposite assumption, that the self is a
transient situation arising from the web of conditions and subject to its changes.
7. Content arising from the context of the work. When the work leaves
the artist's studio, what route does it take into what part of the world? This
decision always has political content. Mail Art and other strategies to bypass the
channels of commodification are expressions of resistance to the processes of
commodity fetishism and are gestures toward the abandonment of exchange
value and the regaining of use value. Other kinds of content cling to specific
contextual situations. The release of a commodifiable aesthetic object into the
marketing network often carries with it an opposite burden of content. It wants to
be bought, and like anything that wants to be bought its attempts to ingratiate
itself with prospective buyers are obvious, no matter that it may have been made
by a monument of integrity such as Jackson Pollock. These are things that one
must cock one's head slightly differently to see—and then at once they become
obvious. All art is site-specific to that degree. Declaredly site-specific art involves
selection of context as a major contentual statement: Is the work protected apart
in a distant fenced compound of the New Mexico desert? Or is it thrown down in
one section or another of an urban downtown? The contentual aspects of such
decisions are as important as their formal aspects are.
8. Content arising from the work's relationship with art history.
When the historicist drive is greatly exacerbated, as at the height of the
Greenberg era, there is also a mythic-millennialist content which carries with it a
weight of German metaphysics and residual Neo-Platonic spirituality. The myth of
the evolution toward the innocent Eye suggests a drive toward the paradise at
the End of History. The opposite of this complete affirmation of art history as a
cosmic-spiritual directionality is an iconoclastic approach, sometimes expressed
in deliberate primitivism. Yet in a sense this type of movement is an attempt to
roll back the tradition of vision to the earlier phase of innocence, the paradise
before history. These two movements, though opposite, complement one
another.
The most common mode of content arising from the work's relationship to art
history is in the use of allusions and quotations to assert a special relationship
with some other work or tradition of works. James McNeill Whistler's introductions
of references to Japanese painting and the Cubist references to African art are
examples of such content, commenting, in both cases, on the closedness of the
Western tradition and suggesting alternative aesthetic codes beyond it. Lately,
the most common type of allusion has been to earlier works in one's own
tradition. This level of content is so important to our present moment that I will
discuss it in detail later.
9. Content that accrues to the work as it progressively reveals its
destiny through persisting in time. I mean here much what Walter
Benjamin meant when he said that a man who died at age 30 would forever after
be regarded as a man who, at whatever stage of his life, would die at age 30.
Whatever occurs to a work as its history unfolds becomes part of the experience
of the work, and part of its meaning, for later generations. Duchamp added
content to the Mona Lisa; Tony Shafrazi to Guernica, and what's-his-name to
Michelangelo's Saint Peter's Pieta. The fact that Greenberg used Pollock's works
as proofs of the idea of contentless painting is now part of the content of those
paintings.
10. Content arising from participation in a specific iconographic
tradition. Iconography is a conventional mode of representing without the
supposition that natural resemblance is involved. Thus to Christians blue may be
felt as Mary's color without a suggestion that it looks like Mary. Through
iconographic conventions, identifications and comments are made through
conventional signals. A Christian, for example, sees not a human woman talking to
a birdwinged man, but the Annunciation. To a Hindu a crowned man on a bird is
Vishnu and Garuda, with all the myths and feelings associated with them called
instantly into play. At less conscious levels are iconographic messages in movies,
from the white and black hats in early Westerns to, say, clothing semiotics in
Scarface. Context signals us toward one response or another: for example, the
ringing telephone in a love film may signal an assignation, while in a gangster film
a contract for assassination.
Whether some widely-distributed iconographic conventions are based on innate
psychological foundations, such as Jungian archetypes, is an unanswerable
question, but it is clear that inherited conventions of this type saturate our
responses and are effective in a hidden way in many artworks. One critical
approach to 20th-century art that has been very little used, yet is remarkably
fruitful, is to subject it to interpretation in terms of the iconographic stream that
goes back in both East and West, to the ancient Near East and beyond. Willem de
Kooning's "Women," for example, may profitably be compared with goddessrepresentations
from Hindu Kali to Egyptian Isis to the leopard goddess of Catal
Huvuk.
11. Content arising directly from the formal properties of the
work. The formalist idea that abstract art lacks content is rightly seen today as
archaic. It seems the associative and conceptualizing activities of the human mind
go on constantly and transpire in an instant. Thus we see everything within some
frame of meaning. If perceptions truly had no content whatsoever they would be
blank moments in consciousness and would leave no trace in memory. At one
level, formal configurations function as ontological propositions. Merely by
shaping energy one models the real; every grasping or shaping is a rhetorical
persuasion for a view of reality. Critics commonly have asserted that music has no
content. But, for example, Beethoven is widely experienced as presenting a view
of reality as stormy, turbulent, and full of passionate striving, while Bach presents
it as serene, cool hyper-realms of sensuous mathematical order. A Pollock drip
painting asserts flux and indefiniteness of identity as qualities that can be found
in the world. This tautological interface between form and content is not a
mystical attempt to unify opposites. It simply means that a work demonstrates a
type of reality by embodying it. Thus abstract art, far from being nonrepresentational,
is, in effect, a representation of concepts; it is based on a
process like that of metaphor, and overlaps somewhat with both iconography and
representation.
This level of content is involved in value judgments, since it relates especially
closely to the content of visual ideology (though visual ideology arises from all
levels of content at once); hence, it confuses aesthetic issues somewhat. The
assertion by Althussierian critics that aesthetic feeling is merely and exclusively a
response to visual ideology is based on the Lacanian model of how the self
constitutes itself from the surrounding cultural codes and then, looking at these
codes again, seems to recognize itself in them. Whether a purely aesthetic level
of response can ever be isolated from the encroachment of this process is a
major question in art today.
12. Content arising from attitudinal gestures (wit, irony, parody,
and so on) that may appear as qualifiers of any of the categories
already mentioned. This level of content usually involves a judgment about
the artist's intentions. The desire to persuade, for example, is a form of
intentionality that saturates some works and involves itself in all their effects John
Keats referred to such a situation when he wrote, "We hate poetry that has a
palpable design upon us." Our word "propaganda" means much the same. In
irony, wit, and so on, some level of content is presented by the artist with
indications that his or her attitude toward it is not direct and asseverative but
indirect and perverse. The process is complex. The viewer's mind compares the
statement received with another hypothetical statement which the mind
constructs as representing the normal or direct version, and by contrast with
which the abnormal and indirect approach can be perceived and measured Thus
ironic indirection, entering into any other category of content, criticizes that
content at the same time it states it, and alters the charge of meaning.
13. Content rooted in biological or physiological responses, or in
cognitive awareness of them. Various claims have been made about types
of communication that operate on a purely physiological level. (In fact, formalism,
with its "purely optical" trend, was a claim of this type, while with its "faculty of
taste" it introduced a supernatural ally to the optic nerve.) Sebastiano Timpanaro
and others have suggested that some types of subject matter, such as sex and
death, appeal to us because we know that we are organisms subject to death and
involved in sexual reproduction; these responses, then, are prior to socioeconomic
acculturation. Contentual readings that may be closer to pure
physiological responses would include the stirring of the genitals in response to
pictures of sexual subjects, the phenomenon of fainting at the sight of blood, or
of becoming nauseous from viewing gory pictures; and so on. This is the level of
content that is often denounced as "sensationalism"—sex and violence—with
the denunciation presumably based on a sense of how easy it is to construct
images that will elicit such responses. Some psychological research has
suggested innate responses to colors, blue for example (perhaps contrary to
popular notions) arousing feelings of aggression and pink of peacefulness.
(There is an odd parody here of what the formalists sometimes called the
"feeling" of color.)
Perhaps the psychoanalytic content associated with the theories of D.W. Winnicott
belongs in this category, on the grounds that it arises from memories of
primordial phases in the development of the organism. In relation to painting,
Winnicott's work suggests (not for the first time) an equation between the figureground
relationship on the one hand and the ego-world relationship on the other.
Work that emphasizes the ground, or an ambiguous condition in which figure is
almost completely merged into ground, expresses the ego's desire to dissolve
itself into a more generalized type of being, on the remembered model of the
infant's sleep on its mother's breast. Work that emphasizes figure, or clear
separation of figure and ground, expresses a sense of egoclarity, and a fear of
ego-loss or of the loss of the clear boundaries between ego and world. (In more
traditional terms, these are, respectively, the Dionysian and the Apollonian.) All
artworks, I think (perhaps all human actions of any type), express an attitude on
this question, no matter what else they express. In some cases this question is
brought into the foreground as a primary artistic content; Barnett Newman, Mark
Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, Agnes Martin, and others have all portrayed the moment
when ego begins to differentiate itself for the dual-unity (as Geza Roheim called
it) with the mother's body. These artists saw in their own work a metaphysical
moment that is a correlate of this psychoanalytic moment: the subject of
"Creation," "Beginning," "Day One," "The Deep," and so on—the first emergence
of differentiated things from the primal abyss of potentiality (compare Winnicott's
term "potential space," which also correlates metaphysically with prime matter).
Seen in these metaphysical terms this content can also be placed in the category
of content arising from the formal properties of the work by a process like that of
metaphor.
This list of thirteen categories is like a series of sample sightings of some great
beast (Meaning) whose behavior is too complex to be fully formulated. As long as
we chose to look for different ways to sort these things out we would find them.
The categories I have presented overlap and interpenetrate at various places. (It
would be foolish to expect a crisp set of categories from an activity of mammals.)
Furthermore, as long as we choose to look for more ways in which the mind
reads meaning out of an artwork, we would find them, too. Each possible network
of relations between categories is itself another means of conveying a precise, if
complex, content, and the possible networks and meta-networks of relations
among the thirteen listed above proceed toward infinity.
The relation between content arising from representation and content arising
from formal properties is a prominent example of this type of interaction. To show
Wellington at Waterloo with Goyaesque grotesquerie, or with expressionistically
fraying edges denying the integrity of ego, would add to the subject matter a
thematic content involving denial of heroic integrity, or some such. Similarly,
grandiosity of scale can conflict with triviality of subject matter, as in much Pop
art. Indeed, conflicts between all levels can occur, and in infinite regresses of
complexity which cannot be individually defined here. A work that features
contradictions among its levels of content thereby gains yet another level
involving concepts like paradox, inner struggle, tension, and negation of
meaning-processes. On the other hand, works that exhibit a high degree of
harmony or mutual confirmation among the various levels of content tacitly model
the real as integrated, whole, and rich in meaning, somewhat in the manner of
the traditional masterpiece.
Not all works, of course, have all levels of content. Abstract art, for example, has
eliminated naive realist representationalism. The number of levels that are in fact
discernibly present (or absent) provides us with yet another level of content.
Works in both the Minimalist and the Sublime directions, for example, exhibit an
attempt to eliminate content or at least to reduce the number of contentual levels
present in the work. This attempt in itself declares or acts out a new level of
content; no work ever attains the zero degree of content, since the concept of a
zero-degree of content is itself a content. In combination with other levels
(primarily verbal supplements by the artist) this content may express the
Minimalist ethic, or the Sublimist, or an impersonalist ethic, as in much
International-style architecture. In 20th-century painting this anti-contentual
content has been of enormous importance. From Malevich to Klein to Newman,
attempts were made to represent concepts like void, emptiness, prime matter,
and the absolute by plastic analogues of the characteristics of solitary grandeur,
nondifferentiation, and potentiality. In contrast, works of the traditional
masterpiece type—from the Sistine ceiling to Guernica—tend to articulate as
many levels of content as possible in their portrayal of a full-bodied sense of rich,
meaningful involvement in life.
This list of contents that arise among categories could be extended indefinitely.
What is essential is that we begin to appreciate the complexity of what we do
when we relate to an artwork. Far from being a "purely optical" and unmediated
reflex, the art event is an infinitely complex semiotic Bead Game involving many
different levels and directions of meaning, and infinite regresses of relations
among them. Let's forget for a moment the Eye of the Soul and think of the
marvelous mammalian brain which instantly reads out these many different codes,
keeps them separate while balancing and relating them, and produces a sense of
the work in which all these factors are represented, however transformed through
interplay with the particular receiving sensibility. Far from a simplistic philistinism,
content is a complex and demanding event without which no artwork could
transpire. It demands our attention since without awareness of these distinctions
and levels we do not really know what has happened already in art, and what is
happening now for the first time.
Theory at the Millennium
Thomas McEvilley
DOCUMENTEXT
McPHERSON & COMPANY
"Thirteen Ways of
Looking at a Blackbird"
Everything we might say about an artwork that is not neutral description of
aesthetic properties is an attribution of content. (Even value judgments, insofar
as they reflect what Althusserian critics call "visual ideology, are implicit
attributions of content.) If there is no such thing as neutral description, then all
statements about art works involve attributions of content, whether acknowledged
or not. There are many possible ways to sort these things out; one is on the
model of geography—what types of content arise from this or that location in the
artwork?
1. Content that arises from the aspect of the artwork that is
understood as representational. This type of content is widely regarded
as the least problematical; ironically, this very assumption lies at the heart of a
tangled problem. We tend to feel that representation works by a recognizable
element of objective resemblance, yet it seems more accurate to say that what we
experience as representation is, like aesthetic taste, a culturally conditioned habit
response not involving objective resemblance. In fact, it is difficult if not
impossible to say what would constitute objective resemblance. And in reverse,
the conviction of objective resemblance habituated in our pictorial tradition seems
to exercise control over our perception of nature. The pictorial tradition,
presented to us as representation of nature, has remade our perception of
nature to conform with the conventions of pictures (as Goodman and others have
demonstrated in their critiques of representation and, especially, of the tradition
of perspectival drawing). The resemblance we seem to see between pictures and
nature does not result from the fact that art imitates nature, but from the fact that
our perception of nature imitates our perception of art. Seen thusly, just as it
seems we can't think anything that our language can't formulate, so it seems we
can't see anything that our pictorial tradition does not include or imply.
Representation, then, especially two-dimensional representation, is not an
objective imitation, but a conventional symbolic system which varies from culture
to culture. What "looks like" nature to an Australian aborigine looks like symbols
to us, and vice versa. Virtually every culture has a tradition of representation
which it sincerely regards as based on resemblance. Faced with a painting of the
Battle of Waterloo, we seem to recognize horses, weapons, warriors, and so on;
what we are in fact recognizing are our conventional ways of representing horses,
weapons, warriors, and so on. The fact that it is specifically the Battle of Waterloo
must come from the next level of content.
2. Content arising from verbal supplements supplied by the artist.
Duchamp's famous remark that the most important thing about a painting is its
title points to a weakness in the "purely optical" theory of art. Artists frequently
issue verbal supplements in an attempt to control the interpretation of their
works, and even the most optical of critics cannot help but be influenced by them.
In reference to a painting of horses, and weapons, and warriors, for example, the
title "The Battle of Waterloo" injects a specific content arising not from optical
features but from words. Abstract and reductionist art, as much as
representational, has been dependent on content supplied in this way. For
example, it would be virtually impossible (as Harold Rosenberg once remarked)
to distinguish the Minimal from the Sublime without such verbal supplements as
Barnett Newman's cabalistic titles, the published interviews with Frank Stella and
Donald Judd, and so on. Robert Smithson's essays have controlled the
interpretation of his works, as Yves Klein's essays have of his. This quality goes
back, really, to the beginnings of art: to Pheidias' identification of a certain nude
male sculpture as Zeus rather than, say, Poseidon or Apollo, to the texts
accompanying Egyptian tomb paintings, to the shaman's explanatory song in
front of his paintings. It is as important today as it ever was.
3. Content arising from the genre or medium of the artwork. This
type of content shifts as ambient cultural forces shift. In the 1960s in America, for
example, a contentual dichotomy between painting and sculpture arose. Painting
came to imply a lack of direct involvement in experience, an absorption in indirect,
distanced preoccupations. Sculpture, on the other hand, was understood, even
when representational, as a real presence of objecthood, since it occupied the
same space the viewer occupied, the space of embodied life. From this ethical
dichotomy arose much of the dynamic of the art of the 1960s and 70s. The
radical new genres were associated with sculpture, performance being called
"living sculpture," installations "environmental sculpture," and so on. Painting was
associated with the old values of convention, rather than actuality. For an artist to
choose to work in oils on canvas was seen as a reactionary political
statement—whereas in the 1950s oil and canvas has signified freedom,
individuality, and existentialism. This dynamic was at the root of the great
acceleration, in the 1960s and '70s, of the project of sculpturizing the painting,
of asserting it as an object in real space rather than as a window into illusionistic
space. Three-dimensional objects were added to canvases to link the
representational surface to sculptural presence. Shaped canvases were similarly
motivated. Explorations of ways to combine colors without producing a figureground
relationship were another aspect of the effort to produce objects that,
while recognizably paintings, were not compromised by suggestions of
representation. The content inherent in the media and genres had attained
political and cultural significance that asserted itself alongside the significance of
the art objects themselves.
History can provide countless examples of this type of content, not least the
distinction between popular and elitist media (in ancient Greece, for example, the
vase painting versus the sculpture) and that between male and female media (for
example, in neolithic societies which restricted pottery-making and basketmaking,
that is, vessel-making in general, to women's groups).
4. Content arising from the material of which the artwork is made.
Within the category of sculpture in the 1960s and '70s, an artist working marble
representationally was at one level making a statement opposed to that of the
artist working with industrial I-beams or fire. Traditional art materials, industrial
materials, esoteric high-tech materials, absurdist materials (like Ed Ruscha's
chocolate), neoprimitive materials (like Eric Orr's bone and blood), pantheistic
materials (Klein's fire, and so on), deceptive self-disguising materials (plastic that
looks like plaster, wood prepared to look like stone)—all these decisions by the
artist carry content quite as much as form. They are judgment pronouncements
that the art viewer picks up automatically without necessarily even thinking of
them as content. They are statements of affiliation to, or alienation from, certain
areas of cultural tradition; as, say, the use of industrial I-beams represents a
celebration, or at least an acceptance, of urban industrial culture, while the use of
marble or ceramic suggests nostalgia for the pre-Industrial Revolution world.
5. Content arising from the scale of the artwork. The New Kingdom
Egyptian custom of sculpting pharaohs and their consorts much larger than life
(as at Abu-Simbel) is an obvious assertion of political content, a portrayal of the
hereditary monarchy and its representatives as awesomely given, like those parts
of nature—sea, sky, desert, mountain—beside which ordinary human power and
stature seem trivial. Such channels of content are not objective and absolute but
culturally shifting: it is possible to conceive a society that would associate unusual
smallness with special power or efficacy. In the Roman empire an emperor was
sculpted during his lifetime about life-size; after death and deification, about twice
life-size. Obviously, decisions of scale have formal significance; their contentual
significances should be equally obvious. John Berger, among others, has pointed
out that the portability of the easel painting was a signifier of private property.
The increased scale of paintings from Barnett Newman onward suggests a more
public arena—a society dominated by large institutions rather than by private
individuals. The huge scale of many paintings today functions in part as a denial
of transience through an implied reconstitution of the architectural support. Scale
always has content, yet we read it so quickly that we hardly notice.
6. Content arising from the temporal duration of the artwork. T h e
Platonist view that underlies the masterpiece tradition was stated by the Roman
poet Seneca: "Vita brevis est, ars longa": life is short, art long. The artist's work,
that is, was expected to outlive him or her. This hope went back at least to
Sappho (6th century BC), who said that her poems would bring her immortality.
The time-reality in which the artwork lived was not precisely historical time: its
proper time dimension was a posterity conceived as a mingling of historical time
and eternity—the artwork would survive through historical time forever, like
Sappho's undying roses. With it something of the artist's Soul (its trace at least)
also became immortal. In terms of Greek philosophy, the artwork has crossed a
metaphysical boundary like that at the level of the moon, below which things die,
above which, not. Great art, in other words, was regarded as having captured
something of deity—as Quintilian said of Pheidias' Zeus. That divine spark inside
the artwork is its immortal Soul, which enables it, like the magical ritual, to
penetrate through to higher metaphysical realms and to act as a channel to
conduct higher powers downward while yet keeping them pure. We are all familiar
with this view. Even in comedies, artists seek immortality. One silly poet of the
Roman Empire is survived only by a scrap of verse saying that his oeuvre would
outlast the ages.
This view of artworks goes back to times when they were sanctified objects made
for use in rituals. It is primitive magic plain and simple, which ritually abolishes
historical time. It typified Egyptian tomb art, which portrayed the places and
things of eternity and was itself magically equivalent to them; it goes back
probably to those Magdalenian paintings in the distant depths of caves, beyond
the reach of the changes of night and day. Yet despite the extreme primitiveness
of its beginnings, this theory of art came into Romantic Europe whole, and has
survived to the present day. Goethe quite as much as Propertius—and Dylan
Thomas as much as Goethe—expected to be singing his poems in a chariot
driven by the Muses toward Heaven.
Works with exaggeratedly durable materials—such as the granite in which the
Egyptians carved pharaohs—participate in this Platonic daydream of
transcending the web of cause and effect here below. The idea, of course, is
integral to the formalist Modern tradition, which is throughout solidly founded on
primitive thoughts and intentions. It is why the artwork is held to have no relation
to socio-economic affairs: it has transcended conditionality and, by capturing a
spark of the divine, has become an ultimate. Signs of this metaphysic virtually
ooze from the works made on its assumption, which can be detected not only by
the durability of their materials but also by the pomposity that surrounds their
aesthetic displays.
Just as clearly, an opposite metaphysic is asserted by works made in
deliberately ephemeral modes or materials—a metaphysic affirming flux and
process and the changing sense of selfhood. The obsessive expectation of
posterity is linked with the belief in Soul and constitutes, in effect, a claim that one
has a Soul. Works affirming flux involve the opposite assumption, that the self is a
transient situation arising from the web of conditions and subject to its changes.
7. Content arising from the context of the work. When the work leaves
the artist's studio, what route does it take into what part of the world? This
decision always has political content. Mail Art and other strategies to bypass the
channels of commodification are expressions of resistance to the processes of
commodity fetishism and are gestures toward the abandonment of exchange
value and the regaining of use value. Other kinds of content cling to specific
contextual situations. The release of a commodifiable aesthetic object into the
marketing network often carries with it an opposite burden of content. It wants to
be bought, and like anything that wants to be bought its attempts to ingratiate
itself with prospective buyers are obvious, no matter that it may have been made
by a monument of integrity such as Jackson Pollock. These are things that one
must cock one's head slightly differently to see—and then at once they become
obvious. All art is site-specific to that degree. Declaredly site-specific art involves
selection of context as a major contentual statement: Is the work protected apart
in a distant fenced compound of the New Mexico desert? Or is it thrown down in
one section or another of an urban downtown? The contentual aspects of such
decisions are as important as their formal aspects are.
8. Content arising from the work's relationship with art history.
When the historicist drive is greatly exacerbated, as at the height of the
Greenberg era, there is also a mythic-millennialist content which carries with it a
weight of German metaphysics and residual Neo-Platonic spirituality. The myth of
the evolution toward the innocent Eye suggests a drive toward the paradise at
the End of History. The opposite of this complete affirmation of art history as a
cosmic-spiritual directionality is an iconoclastic approach, sometimes expressed
in deliberate primitivism. Yet in a sense this type of movement is an attempt to
roll back the tradition of vision to the earlier phase of innocence, the paradise
before history. These two movements, though opposite, complement one
another.
The most common mode of content arising from the work's relationship to art
history is in the use of allusions and quotations to assert a special relationship
with some other work or tradition of works. James McNeill Whistler's introductions
of references to Japanese painting and the Cubist references to African art are
examples of such content, commenting, in both cases, on the closedness of the
Western tradition and suggesting alternative aesthetic codes beyond it. Lately,
the most common type of allusion has been to earlier works in one's own
tradition. This level of content is so important to our present moment that I will
discuss it in detail later.
9. Content that accrues to the work as it progressively reveals its
destiny through persisting in time. I mean here much what Walter
Benjamin meant when he said that a man who died at age 30 would forever after
be regarded as a man who, at whatever stage of his life, would die at age 30.
Whatever occurs to a work as its history unfolds becomes part of the experience
of the work, and part of its meaning, for later generations. Duchamp added
content to the Mona Lisa; Tony Shafrazi to Guernica, and what's-his-name to
Michelangelo's Saint Peter's Pieta. The fact that Greenberg used Pollock's works
as proofs of the idea of contentless painting is now part of the content of those
paintings.
10. Content arising from participation in a specific iconographic
tradition. Iconography is a conventional mode of representing without the
supposition that natural resemblance is involved. Thus to Christians blue may be
felt as Mary's color without a suggestion that it looks like Mary. Through
iconographic conventions, identifications and comments are made through
conventional signals. A Christian, for example, sees not a human woman talking to
a birdwinged man, but the Annunciation. To a Hindu a crowned man on a bird is
Vishnu and Garuda, with all the myths and feelings associated with them called
instantly into play. At less conscious levels are iconographic messages in movies,
from the white and black hats in early Westerns to, say, clothing semiotics in
Scarface. Context signals us toward one response or another: for example, the
ringing telephone in a love film may signal an assignation, while in a gangster film
a contract for assassination.
Whether some widely-distributed iconographic conventions are based on innate
psychological foundations, such as Jungian archetypes, is an unanswerable
question, but it is clear that inherited conventions of this type saturate our
responses and are effective in a hidden way in many artworks. One critical
approach to 20th-century art that has been very little used, yet is remarkably
fruitful, is to subject it to interpretation in terms of the iconographic stream that
goes back in both East and West, to the ancient Near East and beyond. Willem de
Kooning's "Women," for example, may profitably be compared with goddessrepresentations
from Hindu Kali to Egyptian Isis to the leopard goddess of Catal
Huvuk.
11. Content arising directly from the formal properties of the
work. The formalist idea that abstract art lacks content is rightly seen today as
archaic. It seems the associative and conceptualizing activities of the human mind
go on constantly and transpire in an instant. Thus we see everything within some
frame of meaning. If perceptions truly had no content whatsoever they would be
blank moments in consciousness and would leave no trace in memory. At one
level, formal configurations function as ontological propositions. Merely by
shaping energy one models the real; every grasping or shaping is a rhetorical
persuasion for a view of reality. Critics commonly have asserted that music has no
content. But, for example, Beethoven is widely experienced as presenting a view
of reality as stormy, turbulent, and full of passionate striving, while Bach presents
it as serene, cool hyper-realms of sensuous mathematical order. A Pollock drip
painting asserts flux and indefiniteness of identity as qualities that can be found
in the world. This tautological interface between form and content is not a
mystical attempt to unify opposites. It simply means that a work demonstrates a
type of reality by embodying it. Thus abstract art, far from being nonrepresentational,
is, in effect, a representation of concepts; it is based on a
process like that of metaphor, and overlaps somewhat with both iconography and
representation.
This level of content is involved in value judgments, since it relates especially
closely to the content of visual ideology (though visual ideology arises from all
levels of content at once); hence, it confuses aesthetic issues somewhat. The
assertion by Althussierian critics that aesthetic feeling is merely and exclusively a
response to visual ideology is based on the Lacanian model of how the self
constitutes itself from the surrounding cultural codes and then, looking at these
codes again, seems to recognize itself in them. Whether a purely aesthetic level
of response can ever be isolated from the encroachment of this process is a
major question in art today.
12. Content arising from attitudinal gestures (wit, irony, parody,
and so on) that may appear as qualifiers of any of the categories
already mentioned. This level of content usually involves a judgment about
the artist's intentions. The desire to persuade, for example, is a form of
intentionality that saturates some works and involves itself in all their effects John
Keats referred to such a situation when he wrote, "We hate poetry that has a
palpable design upon us." Our word "propaganda" means much the same. In
irony, wit, and so on, some level of content is presented by the artist with
indications that his or her attitude toward it is not direct and asseverative but
indirect and perverse. The process is complex. The viewer's mind compares the
statement received with another hypothetical statement which the mind
constructs as representing the normal or direct version, and by contrast with
which the abnormal and indirect approach can be perceived and measured Thus
ironic indirection, entering into any other category of content, criticizes that
content at the same time it states it, and alters the charge of meaning.
13. Content rooted in biological or physiological responses, or in
cognitive awareness of them. Various claims have been made about types
of communication that operate on a purely physiological level. (In fact, formalism,
with its "purely optical" trend, was a claim of this type, while with its "faculty of
taste" it introduced a supernatural ally to the optic nerve.) Sebastiano Timpanaro
and others have suggested that some types of subject matter, such as sex and
death, appeal to us because we know that we are organisms subject to death and
involved in sexual reproduction; these responses, then, are prior to socioeconomic
acculturation. Contentual readings that may be closer to pure
physiological responses would include the stirring of the genitals in response to
pictures of sexual subjects, the phenomenon of fainting at the sight of blood, or
of becoming nauseous from viewing gory pictures; and so on. This is the level of
content that is often denounced as "sensationalism"—sex and violence—with
the denunciation presumably based on a sense of how easy it is to construct
images that will elicit such responses. Some psychological research has
suggested innate responses to colors, blue for example (perhaps contrary to
popular notions) arousing feelings of aggression and pink of peacefulness.
(There is an odd parody here of what the formalists sometimes called the
"feeling" of color.)
Perhaps the psychoanalytic content associated with the theories of D.W. Winnicott
belongs in this category, on the grounds that it arises from memories of
primordial phases in the development of the organism. In relation to painting,
Winnicott's work suggests (not for the first time) an equation between the figureground
relationship on the one hand and the ego-world relationship on the other.
Work that emphasizes the ground, or an ambiguous condition in which figure is
almost completely merged into ground, expresses the ego's desire to dissolve
itself into a more generalized type of being, on the remembered model of the
infant's sleep on its mother's breast. Work that emphasizes figure, or clear
separation of figure and ground, expresses a sense of egoclarity, and a fear of
ego-loss or of the loss of the clear boundaries between ego and world. (In more
traditional terms, these are, respectively, the Dionysian and the Apollonian.) All
artworks, I think (perhaps all human actions of any type), express an attitude on
this question, no matter what else they express. In some cases this question is
brought into the foreground as a primary artistic content; Barnett Newman, Mark
Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, Agnes Martin, and others have all portrayed the moment
when ego begins to differentiate itself for the dual-unity (as Geza Roheim called
it) with the mother's body. These artists saw in their own work a metaphysical
moment that is a correlate of this psychoanalytic moment: the subject of
"Creation," "Beginning," "Day One," "The Deep," and so on—the first emergence
of differentiated things from the primal abyss of potentiality (compare Winnicott's
term "potential space," which also correlates metaphysically with prime matter).
Seen in these metaphysical terms this content can also be placed in the category
of content arising from the formal properties of the work by a process like that of
metaphor.
This list of thirteen categories is like a series of sample sightings of some great
beast (Meaning) whose behavior is too complex to be fully formulated. As long as
we chose to look for different ways to sort these things out we would find them.
The categories I have presented overlap and interpenetrate at various places. (It
would be foolish to expect a crisp set of categories from an activity of mammals.)
Furthermore, as long as we choose to look for more ways in which the mind
reads meaning out of an artwork, we would find them, too. Each possible network
of relations between categories is itself another means of conveying a precise, if
complex, content, and the possible networks and meta-networks of relations
among the thirteen listed above proceed toward infinity.
The relation between content arising from representation and content arising
from formal properties is a prominent example of this type of interaction. To show
Wellington at Waterloo with Goyaesque grotesquerie, or with expressionistically
fraying edges denying the integrity of ego, would add to the subject matter a
thematic content involving denial of heroic integrity, or some such. Similarly,
grandiosity of scale can conflict with triviality of subject matter, as in much Pop
art. Indeed, conflicts between all levels can occur, and in infinite regresses of
complexity which cannot be individually defined here. A work that features
contradictions among its levels of content thereby gains yet another level
involving concepts like paradox, inner struggle, tension, and negation of
meaning-processes. On the other hand, works that exhibit a high degree of
harmony or mutual confirmation among the various levels of content tacitly model
the real as integrated, whole, and rich in meaning, somewhat in the manner of
the traditional masterpiece.
Not all works, of course, have all levels of content. Abstract art, for example, has
eliminated naive realist representationalism. The number of levels that are in fact
discernibly present (or absent) provides us with yet another level of content.
Works in both the Minimalist and the Sublime directions, for example, exhibit an
attempt to eliminate content or at least to reduce the number of contentual levels
present in the work. This attempt in itself declares or acts out a new level of
content; no work ever attains the zero degree of content, since the concept of a
zero-degree of content is itself a content. In combination with other levels
(primarily verbal supplements by the artist) this content may express the
Minimalist ethic, or the Sublimist, or an impersonalist ethic, as in much
International-style architecture. In 20th-century painting this anti-contentual
content has been of enormous importance. From Malevich to Klein to Newman,
attempts were made to represent concepts like void, emptiness, prime matter,
and the absolute by plastic analogues of the characteristics of solitary grandeur,
nondifferentiation, and potentiality. In contrast, works of the traditional
masterpiece type—from the Sistine ceiling to Guernica—tend to articulate as
many levels of content as possible in their portrayal of a full-bodied sense of rich,
meaningful involvement in life.
This list of contents that arise among categories could be extended indefinitely.
What is essential is that we begin to appreciate the complexity of what we do
when we relate to an artwork. Far from being a "purely optical" and unmediated
reflex, the art event is an infinitely complex semiotic Bead Game involving many
different levels and directions of meaning, and infinite regresses of relations
among them. Let's forget for a moment the Eye of the Soul and think of the
marvelous mammalian brain which instantly reads out these many different codes,
keeps them separate while balancing and relating them, and produces a sense of
the work in which all these factors are represented, however transformed through
interplay with the particular receiving sensibility. Far from a simplistic philistinism,
content is a complex and demanding event without which no artwork could
transpire. It demands our attention since without awareness of these distinctions
and levels we do not really know what has happened already in art, and what is
happening now for the first time.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Homi Bhabha/Perception/Truth
From Pulse-Berlin, A Magazine of culture, creativity and discussion. http://www.pulse-berlin.com/index.php?id=158
Homi Bhabha
Ambivalence...?
The Moving Gun: Is Truth Merely a Matter of Interpretation? ...a discussion with the influential, albeit controversial, postcolonial theorist and Harvard professor Homi Bhabha.
Available languages: English Deutsch
Homi Bhabha is the author of The Location of Culture, a book suggesting that ambivalence is a stimulant of cultural productivity. Bhabha met with us in his office in Cambridge to talk about why the perception and expectation of truth plays an important role in any creative experience.
Pulse: Is there a way to understand truth without thinking of it as part of a story?
Homi Bhabha: I think it’s very difficult to understand the question of truth without some form of narrative because even if you assume that truth is an innate quality of something, in the same spirit that Keats said ‘Truth is beauty, beauty truth’, then truth is still going to be a form of judgment, and judgment assumes some kind of temporality in which you balance various things, and you need language to communicate that.
In what way is truth always a form of judgment?
In that truth is always a claim. You make a claim when you call something true; you are addressing something.
So there is always some medium for our perception, which is a kind of judgment, which is a kind of story we tell?
Well, truth always has to be mediated in some way, and narrative is a convenient way of doing that. It takes time for a person to get at the essence of something, to grasp the tree-ness of the tree or the trueness of the tree’s tree-ness, and the time it takes to do that would itself be some form of narrative.
Lately people seem more concerned with truth; at the same time, truth seems more difficult to find. For years we’ve been focused on the claims made about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and yet even now it’s hard to determine who knew what and when. Is truth contingent on whether or not the person speaking believes what he or she is saying?
First let’s go back to narrative: Did people say there were weapons of mass destruction? Yes, they did. Did they find weapons of mass destruction? No, they didn’t. So based on that, you might want to say that people were, as one famous Englishman put it, ‘economical with the truth’, i.e. they didn’t tell the truth. On the other hand, people say that in the moments leading up to the war the intelligence was not good and the evidence was enough to persuade the Blair and Bush governments to believe in it.
So they could have believed it was true?
They could have persuaded themselves of the need for war in just the same way people can persuade themselves that another person is in love with them. They could have believed in it because their desire for it was so strong. But either way, alongside the question of whether people were honest or dishonest about those things, narrative becomes very important. And whether they believed it or not, genuinely, is an issue that is left even more open because of what actually happened.
It keeps going because of its own inertia. It’s like we relinquish truth to some movement for which we don’t want to take responsibility, and yet we’re still there moving right along with it.
But I think it’s more than just inertia. It’s a particular way of thinking, a particular style of American foreign policy that has had a long history, hundreds of years long, which is the history of pre-emptive action. It’s the idea that you must somehow take control of things before they happen, but when you take action before something has happened, you don’t know if you are hitting the right target.
But depending on whether you destroy that target, the truth might go in various ways.
It’s like Michel Foucault’s idea that there is no Truth with a capital T, no transcendent quality. There is always a battle around what is the true, and it’s the function of discourse to stabilize something as true for a certain period of time, whether it’s a particular laboratory method, whether it’s a particular form of medical diagnosis, whether it’s a particular law relating to behavior or a particular norm. Truth is always a negotiation, and it always has a certain authority.
Well in other areas of society, not only politics, it doesn’t seem to be as much of a negotiation. When someone claims to be writing a memoir for instance, we read it in a different way. The meaning becomes questionable if we learn that something the writer presented to us was actually false. This usually leads to controversy, as has happened with writers such as J.T. Leroy, who claimed to be a homosexual, boy prostitute but turned out to be a 40-year-old woman instead. What is it about writing that changes people’s reaction depending on whether the author claims his or her story is true?
That’s a problem concerning different conventions of reading. Conventions of reading are always based on certain structures or conditions of credibility. If you’re looking at a science fiction piece, you expect one thing. If you were reading an allegory where animals stand for human beings, then you’d expect another. And if you’re reading a memoir that’s been presented to you as something true, then likewise you’re relating to a particular convention from the very beginning. Each piece is a different convention. And each convention has a different kind of identification, a different set of codifications.
But doesn’t it come down to interpretation? Does the writer really control it all?
Well, no, one can’t control it all, but there is a difference. There is a difference between the levels of interpretation that you establish. When you are writing something that you claim actually happened to you, it’s perfectly possible to describe events truthfully, and it’s also perfectly possible that at some point later your perception of those events might change. This type of change is completely different than saying that you were raped, or that you were a drug addict, when in fact those things never really happened to you. For example, I just read a book by Elie Wiesel about his devastating experiences as a young man during the Holocaust. I hope I’m remembering the story correctly -- it would be ironic in the context if I weren’t -- but I think that in an early book of his which was published in French, he said that during the Nazi transport of the Jewish people to the concentration camps, there was a lot of sex going on in the wagons. Then, in the version that I was reading, he says that he’s not so sure that what he’d written about the sex then was really true after all, that perhaps it was only his projection, that perhaps he was at a point in his life where he needed some deep, physical comfort and so he may have actually invented it all. Such a situation belongs to what I meant by reinterpretation. You see he WAS in the wagon, and in that wagon bodies were probably very close to one another, lurching around; there were probably all kinds of sounds in that darkness and desperation and loneliness that might have stimulated different interpretations, one of which might have been that the people were indeed having sex. But that kind of interpretation is very different from questioning whether or not Eli Wiesel was actually in those trains and in that situation.
Do you think we create morality by what we write?
Sure. Sure we do. But how else would you create it? I mean, when you talk about writing I assume you mean écriture -- you mean inscription -- which includes speech, which includes visual signs; it’s not simply what you put down on a piece of paper.
Yes. All of that. Writing a book, writing a film, drawing, creating.
Exactly. Visual signs, visual culture. It’s about a system of meaning. It could be advertising. It could be the Advent calendar. It’s all of this. And how else would morality be articulated?
Articulated or generated? Because I’m talking about generation.
Articulated in the sense of made known, made visible, entering into the lives and thinking and speech of people, but also articulated in the sense of an articulated lorry, where what is moral has to be linked, like an articulated vehicle, to a number of other things or vehicles. Language and meaning are the ways one does that.
So being creative can be thought of as being truthful?
That’s a very broad thing to state but yes, of course, being creative to some extent is about being truthful to something, truthful to your fantasy, truthful to your desire, truthful to your love of language…
But there are other things to consider too, like the play of power and the desire to please.
Well, what do you mean?
If one wants to create something, he or she then has a basic impetus, but that original ‘truth’ will have to come into contact with everything external as well. There’s always the option that one might become false as a way of fitting in with what is already explicit, isn’t there?
Well, of course you’d be conscious in such a way when you were making something. You’d decide the audience you wanted to approach; you’d decide the theme; you’d decide the form; you’d decide the funding; and you’d decide the institution where you would locate the work and so on. What you would not be able to define is the way in which that work over time, or even in its own time, was interpreted or institutionalized. In different places and in different situations there are things which function as truths, but in each of these situations there is always a place from which those ideas or concepts or norms can be questioned.
There’s seems to be an ambivalence here though, in terms of the tension between what one might feel as his or her truth and how that feeling might change as they interact with the world.
Those two things are certainly at play, but there’s also something else at play and that is that as soon as you write a sentence, as soon as you invest a part of yourself in a work, you cannot be fully aware of how you are transcribing your own psychic state into it. The work is always open to interpretation, even against the grain of the author’s intentions.
In that sense, what do you think of the way your own work has been interpreted? Many of your peers, as you know, often criticize you for writing obscurely. I suppose obscurity can also mean ambiguity, and deliberate ambiguity might be a way of leaving something open to as many interpretations as possible. Do you think your writing is obscure? Do you do that on purpose?
I can see how certain things that I write could be difficult. When I’m working on something, there might be a time when I haven’t quite worked out the thought but I know that this gray area is crucial to the argument. In those times, I will still try my best to keep this thought in the text, even if it creates a kind of uncertainty in some way.
So it's important to you to leave this space open for interpretation...
Right. I don’t close off the space and say I’m going to stop there just because I’m on stable ground. When I’m writing it’s very often a high-wire act; it isn’t certain.
There are people who would say that the only way to find new answers is to be able to deal with uncertainty…
Well. Well, I’m sure that’s true.
Homi Bhabha
Ambivalence...?
The Moving Gun: Is Truth Merely a Matter of Interpretation? ...a discussion with the influential, albeit controversial, postcolonial theorist and Harvard professor Homi Bhabha.
Available languages: English Deutsch
Homi Bhabha is the author of The Location of Culture, a book suggesting that ambivalence is a stimulant of cultural productivity. Bhabha met with us in his office in Cambridge to talk about why the perception and expectation of truth plays an important role in any creative experience.
Pulse: Is there a way to understand truth without thinking of it as part of a story?
Homi Bhabha: I think it’s very difficult to understand the question of truth without some form of narrative because even if you assume that truth is an innate quality of something, in the same spirit that Keats said ‘Truth is beauty, beauty truth’, then truth is still going to be a form of judgment, and judgment assumes some kind of temporality in which you balance various things, and you need language to communicate that.
In what way is truth always a form of judgment?
In that truth is always a claim. You make a claim when you call something true; you are addressing something.
So there is always some medium for our perception, which is a kind of judgment, which is a kind of story we tell?
Well, truth always has to be mediated in some way, and narrative is a convenient way of doing that. It takes time for a person to get at the essence of something, to grasp the tree-ness of the tree or the trueness of the tree’s tree-ness, and the time it takes to do that would itself be some form of narrative.
Lately people seem more concerned with truth; at the same time, truth seems more difficult to find. For years we’ve been focused on the claims made about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and yet even now it’s hard to determine who knew what and when. Is truth contingent on whether or not the person speaking believes what he or she is saying?
First let’s go back to narrative: Did people say there were weapons of mass destruction? Yes, they did. Did they find weapons of mass destruction? No, they didn’t. So based on that, you might want to say that people were, as one famous Englishman put it, ‘economical with the truth’, i.e. they didn’t tell the truth. On the other hand, people say that in the moments leading up to the war the intelligence was not good and the evidence was enough to persuade the Blair and Bush governments to believe in it.
So they could have believed it was true?
They could have persuaded themselves of the need for war in just the same way people can persuade themselves that another person is in love with them. They could have believed in it because their desire for it was so strong. But either way, alongside the question of whether people were honest or dishonest about those things, narrative becomes very important. And whether they believed it or not, genuinely, is an issue that is left even more open because of what actually happened.
It keeps going because of its own inertia. It’s like we relinquish truth to some movement for which we don’t want to take responsibility, and yet we’re still there moving right along with it.
But I think it’s more than just inertia. It’s a particular way of thinking, a particular style of American foreign policy that has had a long history, hundreds of years long, which is the history of pre-emptive action. It’s the idea that you must somehow take control of things before they happen, but when you take action before something has happened, you don’t know if you are hitting the right target.
But depending on whether you destroy that target, the truth might go in various ways.
It’s like Michel Foucault’s idea that there is no Truth with a capital T, no transcendent quality. There is always a battle around what is the true, and it’s the function of discourse to stabilize something as true for a certain period of time, whether it’s a particular laboratory method, whether it’s a particular form of medical diagnosis, whether it’s a particular law relating to behavior or a particular norm. Truth is always a negotiation, and it always has a certain authority.
Well in other areas of society, not only politics, it doesn’t seem to be as much of a negotiation. When someone claims to be writing a memoir for instance, we read it in a different way. The meaning becomes questionable if we learn that something the writer presented to us was actually false. This usually leads to controversy, as has happened with writers such as J.T. Leroy, who claimed to be a homosexual, boy prostitute but turned out to be a 40-year-old woman instead. What is it about writing that changes people’s reaction depending on whether the author claims his or her story is true?
That’s a problem concerning different conventions of reading. Conventions of reading are always based on certain structures or conditions of credibility. If you’re looking at a science fiction piece, you expect one thing. If you were reading an allegory where animals stand for human beings, then you’d expect another. And if you’re reading a memoir that’s been presented to you as something true, then likewise you’re relating to a particular convention from the very beginning. Each piece is a different convention. And each convention has a different kind of identification, a different set of codifications.
But doesn’t it come down to interpretation? Does the writer really control it all?
Well, no, one can’t control it all, but there is a difference. There is a difference between the levels of interpretation that you establish. When you are writing something that you claim actually happened to you, it’s perfectly possible to describe events truthfully, and it’s also perfectly possible that at some point later your perception of those events might change. This type of change is completely different than saying that you were raped, or that you were a drug addict, when in fact those things never really happened to you. For example, I just read a book by Elie Wiesel about his devastating experiences as a young man during the Holocaust. I hope I’m remembering the story correctly -- it would be ironic in the context if I weren’t -- but I think that in an early book of his which was published in French, he said that during the Nazi transport of the Jewish people to the concentration camps, there was a lot of sex going on in the wagons. Then, in the version that I was reading, he says that he’s not so sure that what he’d written about the sex then was really true after all, that perhaps it was only his projection, that perhaps he was at a point in his life where he needed some deep, physical comfort and so he may have actually invented it all. Such a situation belongs to what I meant by reinterpretation. You see he WAS in the wagon, and in that wagon bodies were probably very close to one another, lurching around; there were probably all kinds of sounds in that darkness and desperation and loneliness that might have stimulated different interpretations, one of which might have been that the people were indeed having sex. But that kind of interpretation is very different from questioning whether or not Eli Wiesel was actually in those trains and in that situation.
Do you think we create morality by what we write?
Sure. Sure we do. But how else would you create it? I mean, when you talk about writing I assume you mean écriture -- you mean inscription -- which includes speech, which includes visual signs; it’s not simply what you put down on a piece of paper.
Yes. All of that. Writing a book, writing a film, drawing, creating.
Exactly. Visual signs, visual culture. It’s about a system of meaning. It could be advertising. It could be the Advent calendar. It’s all of this. And how else would morality be articulated?
Articulated or generated? Because I’m talking about generation.
Articulated in the sense of made known, made visible, entering into the lives and thinking and speech of people, but also articulated in the sense of an articulated lorry, where what is moral has to be linked, like an articulated vehicle, to a number of other things or vehicles. Language and meaning are the ways one does that.
So being creative can be thought of as being truthful?
That’s a very broad thing to state but yes, of course, being creative to some extent is about being truthful to something, truthful to your fantasy, truthful to your desire, truthful to your love of language…
But there are other things to consider too, like the play of power and the desire to please.
Well, what do you mean?
If one wants to create something, he or she then has a basic impetus, but that original ‘truth’ will have to come into contact with everything external as well. There’s always the option that one might become false as a way of fitting in with what is already explicit, isn’t there?
Well, of course you’d be conscious in such a way when you were making something. You’d decide the audience you wanted to approach; you’d decide the theme; you’d decide the form; you’d decide the funding; and you’d decide the institution where you would locate the work and so on. What you would not be able to define is the way in which that work over time, or even in its own time, was interpreted or institutionalized. In different places and in different situations there are things which function as truths, but in each of these situations there is always a place from which those ideas or concepts or norms can be questioned.
There’s seems to be an ambivalence here though, in terms of the tension between what one might feel as his or her truth and how that feeling might change as they interact with the world.
Those two things are certainly at play, but there’s also something else at play and that is that as soon as you write a sentence, as soon as you invest a part of yourself in a work, you cannot be fully aware of how you are transcribing your own psychic state into it. The work is always open to interpretation, even against the grain of the author’s intentions.
In that sense, what do you think of the way your own work has been interpreted? Many of your peers, as you know, often criticize you for writing obscurely. I suppose obscurity can also mean ambiguity, and deliberate ambiguity might be a way of leaving something open to as many interpretations as possible. Do you think your writing is obscure? Do you do that on purpose?
I can see how certain things that I write could be difficult. When I’m working on something, there might be a time when I haven’t quite worked out the thought but I know that this gray area is crucial to the argument. In those times, I will still try my best to keep this thought in the text, even if it creates a kind of uncertainty in some way.
So it's important to you to leave this space open for interpretation...
Right. I don’t close off the space and say I’m going to stop there just because I’m on stable ground. When I’m writing it’s very often a high-wire act; it isn’t certain.
There are people who would say that the only way to find new answers is to be able to deal with uncertainty…
Well. Well, I’m sure that’s true.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Reasons to go to graduate school
I've been asked so frequently why artists should go to grad school that I decided to post a little bullet point list of what I believe are fundamental reasons to attend. Following that are a few thoughts on what you can bring to grad school.
1.) Its fundamentally different than undergrad. Undergrad teaches you the general history/exposure to materials, techniques, process. Grad school takes all this as a given and pushes you forward to more focused explorations. You need this. It's important that your work move beyond undergrad school to something even better. You can do it on your own, but it's quicker, I think, when grad school is a part of that equation.
2.) You get to be exposed to new people and ideas that may be contradictory to what you've already learned.
3.) It's a two year experience (except for Concordia) that allows you to live in a different place.
4.) There's a good deal of debate whether you should go directly into grad school or wait a few years. I think waiting is not a bad thing since you get more life experience and your work changes. Then once you do get accepted you're really rarin' to get in there to work and learn.
5.) You'll meet other serious artists who are like you, your community will be a smaller pool and you'll often be friends with these other people for life.
6.) Grad school usually have deeper theoretical components and instructors ask you to somehow relate theory to your visual art. You'll be reading anything from Marxism to Homi Bhabha to Greenberg and you'll be having some pretty high level discussions.
7.) Critiques are at a tough level too. The artists are intent on engaging an international dialogue and everyone expects the art to be at that level.
8.) You cannot teach without an MFA. If teaching is on your radar, you'll need it. Anyone teaching now without an MFA has basically been grandfathered into the institution, meaning they were there already and they got a free pass. Nearly every school's search policy has the MFA as a bottom line requirement to go to the next level of consideration.
9.) The MFA gives you credibility. It's generally recognized as the terminal degree in painting. (There are some PhD programs out there, but the idea is not widely accepted as of yet.) When you go for galleries, or residencies, or visiting artist positions, etc., it shows you're really serious about your practice and career. It lets committees know you've put in the extra work and really honed your art. Also, it really does show when an artist goes to grad school. See item 10.
10.) It helps you to really center in on your voice. Voice is your individuality coming through loud and clear in your art. It's the thing that makes your work unlike anyone elses. This is often a strong theme in grad schools, and it should be. Again, you can find this on your own, I just think it's faster with grad school playing a role.
11.) Because you're challenged in all new areas and directions, you'll grow as an artist who really understands the context of your art and the reasons you do it.
12.) Don't flinch, but art IS a scholarly pursuit. You'll be exposed to new teaching methodologies and learning experiences that may transform you in ways you didn't expect.
We touch on many of these themes in undergraduate school but the design of the program does not allow some of these to be explored as deeply as they are in grad school.
What you will want to bring to graduate school:
1.) A serious attitude about your art. The competition is high. School don't accept those who just want to paint once in a while.
2.) A strong work ethic. The more you put into it, the more you get out of it. Often those who have had a bad experience in grad school admit they didn't give much.
3.) Liberal studies will be a component, get ready to read some pretty dense stuff.
4.) A strong will and opinion. You will (or should in the best schools) be challenged. Often, everything you've learned will be put up for reevaluation. You'll change because of this, or if you really believe in it, you'll figure out how to strongly defend your beliefs.
5.) An openness to taking risks and to changing. Just decide you want to grow. See it as your first or second year undergrad and be open to anything.
Finally, I do not particularly recommend taking a grad program at the same school, even though it's sort of in vogue to offer a split BFA/MFA 5 year program. It's too easy to study with the same instructors for all those years. You deserve to be tested and challenged in new ways with instructors who have entirely different world views. I also think, if you can, that it's beneficial to attend at a city different from your undergrad's. Same reason. If you can't do this, think seriously about some form of exchange or mobility component.
I'm sure there's more and I may update this after I reread it in a few weeks or so.
1.) Its fundamentally different than undergrad. Undergrad teaches you the general history/exposure to materials, techniques, process. Grad school takes all this as a given and pushes you forward to more focused explorations. You need this. It's important that your work move beyond undergrad school to something even better. You can do it on your own, but it's quicker, I think, when grad school is a part of that equation.
2.) You get to be exposed to new people and ideas that may be contradictory to what you've already learned.
3.) It's a two year experience (except for Concordia) that allows you to live in a different place.
4.) There's a good deal of debate whether you should go directly into grad school or wait a few years. I think waiting is not a bad thing since you get more life experience and your work changes. Then once you do get accepted you're really rarin' to get in there to work and learn.
5.) You'll meet other serious artists who are like you, your community will be a smaller pool and you'll often be friends with these other people for life.
6.) Grad school usually have deeper theoretical components and instructors ask you to somehow relate theory to your visual art. You'll be reading anything from Marxism to Homi Bhabha to Greenberg and you'll be having some pretty high level discussions.
7.) Critiques are at a tough level too. The artists are intent on engaging an international dialogue and everyone expects the art to be at that level.
8.) You cannot teach without an MFA. If teaching is on your radar, you'll need it. Anyone teaching now without an MFA has basically been grandfathered into the institution, meaning they were there already and they got a free pass. Nearly every school's search policy has the MFA as a bottom line requirement to go to the next level of consideration.
9.) The MFA gives you credibility. It's generally recognized as the terminal degree in painting. (There are some PhD programs out there, but the idea is not widely accepted as of yet.) When you go for galleries, or residencies, or visiting artist positions, etc., it shows you're really serious about your practice and career. It lets committees know you've put in the extra work and really honed your art. Also, it really does show when an artist goes to grad school. See item 10.
10.) It helps you to really center in on your voice. Voice is your individuality coming through loud and clear in your art. It's the thing that makes your work unlike anyone elses. This is often a strong theme in grad schools, and it should be. Again, you can find this on your own, I just think it's faster with grad school playing a role.
11.) Because you're challenged in all new areas and directions, you'll grow as an artist who really understands the context of your art and the reasons you do it.
12.) Don't flinch, but art IS a scholarly pursuit. You'll be exposed to new teaching methodologies and learning experiences that may transform you in ways you didn't expect.
We touch on many of these themes in undergraduate school but the design of the program does not allow some of these to be explored as deeply as they are in grad school.
What you will want to bring to graduate school:
1.) A serious attitude about your art. The competition is high. School don't accept those who just want to paint once in a while.
2.) A strong work ethic. The more you put into it, the more you get out of it. Often those who have had a bad experience in grad school admit they didn't give much.
3.) Liberal studies will be a component, get ready to read some pretty dense stuff.
4.) A strong will and opinion. You will (or should in the best schools) be challenged. Often, everything you've learned will be put up for reevaluation. You'll change because of this, or if you really believe in it, you'll figure out how to strongly defend your beliefs.
5.) An openness to taking risks and to changing. Just decide you want to grow. See it as your first or second year undergrad and be open to anything.
Finally, I do not particularly recommend taking a grad program at the same school, even though it's sort of in vogue to offer a split BFA/MFA 5 year program. It's too easy to study with the same instructors for all those years. You deserve to be tested and challenged in new ways with instructors who have entirely different world views. I also think, if you can, that it's beneficial to attend at a city different from your undergrad's. Same reason. If you can't do this, think seriously about some form of exchange or mobility component.
I'm sure there's more and I may update this after I reread it in a few weeks or so.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Active Learning
Active Learning -- what's in it for you...
http://admin.sfcc.edu/~drc/independence%20cafe/Becoming%20An%20Active%20Learner.htm
http://admin.sfcc.edu/~drc/independence%20cafe/Becoming%20An%20Active%20Learner.htm
Color Matters
Jill Morton's great site on color. Explore and post on her bulletin board.
http://www.colormatters.com/
http://www.colormatters.com/
Galleries Worldwide
The best listing of galleries worldwide. Gallery Guide.
http://www.artinfo.com/galleryguide/
http://www.artinfo.com/galleryguide/
A good little read on developing a creative habit.
Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit. Getting your mind and body into the habit of creating every day.
http://www.simonsays.com/content/book.cfm?tab=1&pid=502946&agid=2
http://www.simonsays.com/content/book.cfm?tab=1&pid=502946&agid=2
Letters to a Young Writer
Good information in this book by Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa. Click on the excerpt, which is the first chapter.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0312421729/ref=sib_dp_pt#reader-link
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0312421729/ref=sib_dp_pt#reader-link
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