Art in Context

Shapeless.

I have just finished attending a course on post-modernism in which theorists such as Deleuze seem to argue that a piece of art stands in "its own right" as an embodiment of a transcendence of capturable concepts. Other contributors to this view include Heideggar with his dichotomy of "the World" (of known concepts) and "the Earth" (The elusive and ineffable substrate of the World)..."good art" reflecting the latter.

From my own position of rejecting "naive realism", I would argue that no work of art exists in its own right. Just as there was a "creative event" for a particular piece which might have included aspects of the zeitgeist, there is also the current "observation event" in which the history may be irrelevent to the synchronic impact.

Interesting that this view would resurface under the guise of postmodernism, since it sounds like only the most recent incarnation of the belief in art's autonomy from worldly matters--a view that can be traced back to the Romantic era. (Whether it goes back further than that is something of a debate in music history; I'd be interested to hear what scholars from other disciplines say on the matter.)

I frequently wonder what one has to gain by espousing such a view. As far as I can tell it is advanced primarily to preserve the sanctity of the aesthetic experience from the point of view of an individual observer. If that is the case, I suppose I can understand it if not quite agree with it; but the question still remains for me why the notion of artworks being products of historical and cultural circumstances is even considered a threat to the aesthetic experience at all. Are the two incompatible? It's not obvious to me that they are.



Yes, I agree that the meanings of artworks are limited neither to the past circumstances in which they were produced nor to the current circumstances in which they are being perceived, or to any one thing in between, but are rather syntheses of all of these. Meanings accrue as artworks are received (and even "used") in different eras by different audiences. Even the view that art's meaning transcends historical contingency is itself one of many meanings that have (retroactively) been superimposed on this or that artwork, as this book review attests to.

I can understand the impulse to favor one particular meaning (one's own, for example) over another, but I can't understand the impulse to deny a specific angle of meaning altogether. What is gained by doing so?

Shapeless,

Deleuze, lihe Nietzche, seems to be obsessed with "the will"...with continuous "creative reinvention of self". It is almost as though we have a duty to throw away the past in order to be. This view is perhaps the basis of an answer.

This is, of course, an inherently vague topic for analysis. I have read some art historians and critics and respond to them only as much as they appeal to MY subjective sense of what is (my) art. Clement Greenberg (aesthetic formalism for its own sake) and Harold Rosenberg (the act of painting as expressive aerobics) were my heros at different times during the era of abstract expressionism. Meyer Shapiro (the most intelligent of all) seemed to last longest at the top of my pantheon of observers. But observers is all that they were. Shapiro dabbled but that's all I can say for it. Critics talk but can't do and painters paint and rarely find in themselves the ability to take an objective point of view on art. I am very negative about a central function of art historians, i.e., their power to define what we should remember. And I'm appalled by artists who try to create art based on their anticipation of where art is going (derived, of course, from their reading of the historians' construction of what has counted and sometimes, with a greenbergian historicism, where art will go. This deprives their work of expressive authenticity.
Now that I've gotten that off my chest, I DO very much like to think of art as containing a quality that transcends historical contingency. But I also think that culture and history have influence. Dada and the drawings of Kollwitz would not have occurred without the horrors of the two great wars, and surrealism would not have emerged without Freud, etc. etc. But in all the ages I rank works of art primarily in terms of their aesthetic power, as opposed to their messages.
When I went to Mexico City (1955) to study painting at the academy of San Carlos, social realism was the guiding principle behind the work of the major muralists--Orozco, Sequieros, Rivera and others, but NOT Tamayo who remained a painter of beauty--and I took with me the values of American abstract expressionism (more or less an art for art's sake orientation, that infected me while studying at the Choinards school in Los Angeles). Well, in Mexico I suffered no small amount of teasing from professors, saying that I preferred my navel to the world of human suffering. But when I examine their work I insist that I see an essentially tacit but powerful committment to aesthetic principles (in their designs/compositions) that transcend their political messages.
What I dislike in contemporary art is its rejection of "beauty' ( I do not refer to prettiness, of course) and its committment to ideas (as in the recently declined Conceptual Art). Among the champions of such work seems to be the philosopher Arthur Danto whose views have been published in a number of books and The Nation magazine. To Danto the point of a painting is its embodiment of ideas. I reject his effort to make art a branch of philosophy. If anything it is the reverse. Just kidding.
Most of my painting efforts have been guided by a goal of aesthetic power for its own sake; sometimes they are little more than illustrations of ideas (and those are never among my favorites), and sometimes the ideas are implicit. The best have had the ineffability of music--"toward which all art is inclined" (author forgotten).
I guess I have not addressed your problem at all

(You can say that again...)

One thing to keep in mind is that there is a difference between an artwork being a result of historical circumstances, on one hand, and an artwork having a "message," on the other. The former does not necessarily entail the latter. To say that T.S. Eliot was anti-semitic is not to say that everything he wrote was an expression of anti-semitism. The reviewer that I quoted makes the same mistake: what bothers him about one of the books he's reviewing is that it claims that Brahms was a product of a Romantic Austrian liberalism but does not show how specific pieces promote Romantic Austrian liberalism, as if one mapped onto the other in a tidy one-to-one relationship.



Both views run the risk of unnecessarily polarizing the two. Is it not possible to have some appreciation for the formal features of art while still being sensitive to the world of human suffering? Is it not possible to be committed to aesthetic principles while still having a political message? To be fair, many artists and critics of the twentieth century have operated under the assumption that the answer is no; and as you implied, these are the artists who have tended to be assimilated into the academic canon for just that reason. Abstraction is associated with artistic freedom, while "messages" are associated with political pandering; or, on the other side of fence, messages are associated with social responsibility while abstraction is associated with self-congratulatory irrelevance. This opposition is one of the most lasting legacies of the Cold War. I just wonder what it would take for us to finally get past these arbitrary categories.