Several years ago I became the pariah of my social scene when I suggested to some painter friends of mine that painting was "dead." Far from being a celebrant of this news, I was more interested in engaging my brothers-of-the-leaf, all of whom were committed painters, in a vital and interesting dialog about art, meaning and the nature of what is "real."
I can hardly lay claim to the genesis of this argument, but I did think at the time that there was something to it, especially as it pertained to "objective," or "representational" or "realist" painting. No surprise then that this particular group of artists demonstrated nothing short of antipathy for me, not to mention anger and dismissal for the argument. I'm not sure if it matters, but I don't think any of them are still painting.
So what, exactly, is the argument? Having read a little of Plato's "Republic" in college, augmented by more than a few ponderous listening sessions focused on John Lennon's "Watching the Wheels" I felt pretty comfortable with the concept of the Platonic Essence. The gist, for those who don't know, is that we are all living in a sensory puppet-play, and that everything we see is simply a "shadow on the wall."
True reality lies in a nether-world of conceptual perfection. Thus there is one chair, and all chairs here on planet Earth are "one step removed" from the essence of chairness. Whew! It makes the oncoming traffic a little less intimidating.
Following this line of reasoning we see that artists are faced with a conundrum, because we are basically charged with an analysis of the nature of things, while anything we create is actually two steps removed from reality.
Clearly Plato never saw an Ad Reinhardt canvas, and I doubt he could have conceived of art as we now consider it. "Artists" in his day were actually considered highly-skilled technicians (I believe the Greek word for art was "techne"), and it wasn't until the "artist-as-genius" concepts of the Renaissance came into vogue that people started question just what art was for.
Now I will confess with alacrity that such philosophical gyrations will not by necessity yield better art. Nor will they endow one with a better sense of esthetic judgment. But I do think there may be something there, and my reasons follow.
It seems to me that the real magic of art is the power to manifest ideation in tangible form. This, in many ways, is the power of language. But given the notion that a manifestation of electrochemical activity is somewhere close to the focal point of artistic value, then wouldn't one by extension recognize a responsibility to create something as self-sufficient as possible?
Representational (or objective, or literal, etc.) work by definition relies upon language for its success. I happen to love a great deal of such work, and personally find much of it essentially valuable. But there's no getting around the fact that language creates a necessary reliance upon external reference for meaning.
Words are abstractions, as are brush strokes, as are patches of sfumato and chiaroscuro. And all too often we are confronted with rendered images which have absolutely nothing to do with the substrait upon which they exist. As a result 3-dimensional objects often attain "thingliness" with much greater ease that those which are rendered. That doesn't make them better art, mind you, as a stroll through the Skokie Sculpture park will readily demonstrate.
OK. I can already hear the cries from my friends who paint, and draw, and create brilliant objects which are often about 2-dimensions. Please understand - this is not an indictment, and even if it were, it's not my indictment. Truth be told, there's probably more 2-dimensional work in my collection than otherwise.
The salient question here is one of the nature of what's "real." Do we really live in a society where the story is more real than the event? That would be the case if you really think that "representational" work is more "realistic" than "abstract" work.
But Autumn Rhythm, for example, is reality - it is it's own self-contextualizing little world, and even though we can take pleasure and wonder in the evidence of Pollock's dance, we need not know the language in order to apprehend the form. It is self-reliant. It self-sustaining: it is real.
I bring this up because I think we're seeing a new sense of appreciation for form. Dance is a form. Painting is a form. Drawing is a form, and so on. Provided we know the songs, it's much less important to know the chords. As they say in the blues, it ain't the meat, it's the motion.
So where's all this leading? Well, ironically enough (and it is really ironic) I think it's leading art away from overt intellectualism and back to the essential, somewhat ineffable empirical existentialism of the past. What I'm getting at is that real art, regardless of form, provides us with a transcendent experience which is somehow empirical at the same time. I recognize the inherent contradiction here - how can the empirical and the transcendent coexist in one object?
But maybe, just maybe that is the real power of real art - it braids together and makes sense of the two most powerful, confusing, potent and at times vexing aspects of the human experience - ideation and external reality.
Henri Focillon's wonderful essay, The Life of Forms in Art, argues that form is the fundamental and self-sufficient but may evoke unlimited signifieds. He asserts that language is one of those signifieds. Art, he claims, is form alone, and whatever we make of it relies on something signified, something secondary to it and unneccessary.
Thus, it matters not what an artist's intentions are or what a critic's or viewer's assessments are insofar as form (art) is concerned; intention may be necessary to the action of making art and judgment may be useful in seeking art quality but they cannot identify the essence of form. For Focillon and others, there are but two types of form, abstract and organic and each of them alludes to the other. Each is the other.
Thus the dialectical relationship between abstract and organic (or figural) and, worse, the artificial split between them is a conceptual construct, based in language, not form. What this amounts to is that no form has a necessary meaning, other than to mean itself. In a brilliant introduction to a new edition of Focillon's Life of Forms (1989) John Molino says, "...even more than artistic creation, criticism and art history have fallen prey to a dangerous deformation which consists in linking art and conceptual thought too closely." Focillon himself said, " Art is made up, not of the artist's intentions but of works of art.
The most voluminous collection of commentary and memoirs, written by artists whose understanding of the problems of form is fully equalled by their understanding of words, could never replace the meanest work of art...We are always tempted to read into form a meaning other than its own, to confuse the notion of form with that of image and sign. But whereas an image implies the representation of an object, and a sign signifies an object, form signifies only itself." For me the goal of the artist is to discover form, not meaning; in short, the artist seeks the meaningless.
William Conger
And then there is the idea of the formless, the gap between realms of form. I suspect the formless is what we must approach as closely as possible as a way of making the emergence of new form more starkly evident. The formless can be thought of as Dionysian, chaos, excess, indifference, eros, violence, the banal, the absurd, and so on, altogether lacking form and bent on destruction. Form is the Appollonian, order, system, genesis, etc. Somehow I think art must approach the formless, the Dionysian as closely as possible, to be at the point of destruction and at the end of art. I think the best art teeters on the edge of the utter annihilation of form. Frankly, I think Jeanne Dunning's work comes as close to that as anything I'm aware of. Her work consistently tests and tempts the formless and as a result we become more keenly aware of its inherent form and its relevance to life. From what I've seen, I could say the same of Wesley Kimler's work. Others come to mind. So go close to chaos, go closer, closer still. New form is there.
William Conger
Well Bill, I would say rather than seeking the 'meaningless', art at its best lacks purpose: a place 'far from human habitation' where form for instance can well up, be made, and, expressed- thus allowing us the opportunity to see what we mean. That what this affords us is the possibility to live in truth, Plato's truth if you like, of form attempting clarity that echos perfection, or, clarification of conciousness -an esthetic experience.
You like Dunning way more than I do-
I love that word "thingly"! "Das Ding als Ding" made into an adverb. You make some wonderful points Dave, and William too, but I would object to separating form and content (or more pertinently for your post, subject matter). I've always been rather anti-Platonic, finding more inspiration in Gadamer, Bakhtin and Wittgenstein. I'm not certain I would like a "return" to Existentialism as it was practiced earlier, either, but then, nothing ever returns in the same way anyway. I'd be happy with a lot more Kierkegaard, but not much Sartre, and lots lots lots less Nietzsche.
Danto has emphasized that "works of art are embodied meanings," and I think rightly so. I have my own little drawn-out ontological statement on art, of which I am a bit too proud:
"Art works are objects of perception (whatever the media) created (formed, presented, chosen, etc.) for multiple interpretations; ones which were furthermore wrought or offered within (viewed as falling inside) the context or history of what is called art in the culture in question. Objects wherein the form and the content are inextricably interwoven, each mirroring the other in its own terms."
This is the full "philosophical" version, meaning cramming everything in. In the short sound bite version, I would say, "Art works are objects of perception created for multiple interpretations, ones wherein the form and the content mirror one other."
William, I love the idea of "the gap between realms of form," although I must say I don't see it in Jeanne's work. Also, I'd like to add, in relationship to the title of this post, that I feel, as I painted in two of my Covers paintings (one in English, one in German), that "Saying 'The Death Of' is What is Dead." (The German one is here:
http://sharkforum.org/archives/brandl_images/brandl_cover_totder2.jpg )
Nothing in art is ever dead, it simply changes status, fades for a while, is less hip, makes a comeback, etc. etc. I've been through the death of video twice, the death of installation art once, and the death of painting is now up to about 10 times, making it something like an Avatar, always coming back. I think it is THE discipline which is best at subsuming everything into itself. It is just not (politically) the privileged "practice" at this time, which is probably justified revenge for its previous over-dominance, nonetheless it is time to now stop overlooking and under-appreciating it, which tendency has become more of a fashion demand than a philosophical reality.