The End of Art and Aesthetics: Musings on Hegel

Thursday, May 7, 2015

Interpreting Hegel's "Lectures on Aesthetics"

Apollo Belvedere

Circa 120–140; copy of bronze original of ca. 350–325 BC.

Marble, 224 cm (88 in)

Over the course of his lectures, Hegel’s approach to the philosophy of art varied, so that in the materiel from 1818-20, for example, “the content and structure…[are both] closely connected to the systematic position allocated to art in the Encyclopedia of 1917…[there,] Hegel lectured on art and religion together, treating them separately for the first time in Berlin [1920-1]” (Gaiger, 2006:161). Hotho had access to that material, as well as his own notes from 1823, 1826, and 1828-9, but the lecture notes are themselves all much shorter, more tentative, and more exploratory than Hotho’s volumes would indicate, suggesting again that Hegel was still working out his philosophical aesthetics when he died in 1831. Therefore any accurate interpretation of Hotho’s volumes-or Knox’ translation of them-must include an interpretation of the difference between Hegel’s own lecture notes, the student transcripts that provided access to the last three courses, Hotho’s own way of integrating and handling these materials, and the development of Hegel’s philosophy of art as reflected during a particular lecture series. The differences between the source materials and Hotho’s three volumes, then, pose the hermeneutic challenges of reinterpreting not only Hegel’s own philosophy of art, but also the distortions caused by the influence of those volumes (through Knox’ translation) on philosophical aesthetics in the English speaking world: “…according to one of the leading specialists on Hegel’s aesthetics, Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, Hotho distorted Hegel’s thought in various ways: he gave Hegel's account of art a much stricter systematic structure than Hegel himself had given it, and he supplemented Hegel's account with material of his own (PKÄ, xiii–xv).

Friday, March 27, 2015

Interpreting and Misinterpreting Hegel's "Aesthetics"

Jackson Pollock Number 8 (1949)

Oil, enamel, and aluminum paint on canvas (86.6 x 180.9 cm.)

Neuberger Museum, State University of New York

It should be well noted at the outset that the interpretive problems associated with the Lectures are so extraordinarily complex that we simply cannot be sure about the precise relationship between the Knox translation and Hegel’s own thought. Besides the difficulties common to any translation of a complex philosophical work, the text from which Knox worked consists of a heavily edited edition of Hegel’s lecture notes rather than a treatise, and therefore reflects the process of Hegel’s thought working itself out rather than a finished, polished facet of his system. That in turn has been filtered through the perceptions and concerns of the note takers and the editor. “We know from Hegel’s correspondences that although he hoped to publish a work on the philosophy of art he “was” not yet ready to do so. Gethmann-Siefert has urged that we should see his aesthetics as ‘a work in progress,’ subject to continual rewriting over the different lecture series” (Gaiger, 2006:162):

“Heinrich Gustav Hotho (1802–1873) published the three-volume Ästhetik (1835) four years after the death of Hegel. From archive research it has become clear that in the ‘compilation’ of his Hegelian Ästhetik Hotho employed mainly his own lectures of 1823. This has led to the view that Hothos’s 1823 lectures taken all together actually constitute Hegelian aesthetics. [Weiss’] article seeks to challenge this notion. Hegel gave four series of lectures on aesthetics in Berlin in 1820/21, 1823, 1826, and 1828/29. Since he never wrote his own work on aesthetics, one might consider the edition of four series of lectures to be the ‘real’ Hegelian Ästhetik.”[1]

[1]. János Weiss, “Auf den Spuren der richtigen Hegelschen Ästhetik” (abstract) from Knihovna Akademie věd Česká republika http://dlib.lib.cas.cz/2745/ (accessed 10/15/08)

Saturday, February 28, 2015

Duchamp After Hegel: Preparatory Remarks

Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic (1919)

Collage of pasted papers, 90 x 144 cm

Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Our larger argument that Duchamp exemplifies Hegel’s theory of art’s dissolution must be framed by some preparatory remarks about the special challenges to interpretation presented by the Lectures on Fine Art. For one thing, the Knox translation of Hegel’s notes requires special hermeneutic caution, not least because the text consists of edited lectures and is therefore filtered through the perceptions and concerns of the note takers and the editor. The key interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of art within the English-speaking world, then, bears a particularly complex and vexing relationship to the thought of Hegel. We must also explain the importance of referring to the dissolution of art rather than the “end of art,” a simple but vital correction to the numerous misinterpretations of the Lectures that circulate throughout the secondary literature. Finally, in preparation for the main argument, we will develop a way of reading Hegel’s philosophy of art within the context of his whole system. All of this is necessary in order to revise the way that the “end of art” thesis is currently located within Lectures on Fine Art.

Saturday, February 21, 2015

Roman Satire, Romantic Irony, Duchamp's Dada: Dialectic in Hegel's Art History

Marcel Duchamp, “Tu m’” (1918)

Oil on canvas, with bottle brush, three safety pins, and one bolt (69.8 x 303 cm)

Yale University Art Gallery

Our explication of Hegel’s Lectures will first address the dissolution of art through Hegel’s conceptions of Roman satire and Romantic irony. Next Roman satire and Romantic irony will be viewed through Hegel’s conception of the relationships between art and religion, systematically connecting art’s dissolution to the roles of Roman and Christian religion in the development of Spirit. Finally, I’ll argue that we can, via Roman satire and Romantic irony, apply the theme of art’s dissolution to the work of Marcel Duchamp, which enables us to produce a truly Hegelian reading of Contemporary art. This step will involve a critique of the work of Arthur Danto and his interpretation of Duchamp and Warhol. The conclusion will argue that Duchamp’s work represents a synthesis of Roman satire and Romantic irony, thereby constituting yet another occurrence of art’s dissolution. In developing that argument I’ll offer some criticisms of contemporary art and art writing.

Thursday, February 19, 2015

Satirical and Ironic Dissolutions of Art: Duchamp's Synthesis

Roy Lichtenstein, “Brushstroke” (1965)

Offset lithograph, 23" x 29" Tate Museum, London

Once we address art in terms a systematic reading of Hegel’s “Lectures,” we’ll finally be able to apply Hegel’s concept of art’s dissolution to the contemporary artworld by historically grasping the advent of Marcel Duchamp as a replaying of the moment of art’s dissolution. For better or worse, it is in large part Duchamp’s synthesis of the satirical and ironic dissolutions of art that define contemporary art. The revised Hegelian approach that emerges is not merely critical of the contemporary, however, but is also equipped to understand and appreciate it, prepared to retain its most valuable possibilities, and thereby able to remain hopeful about what lies beyond.

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Duchamp and the Dissolution of Art

A firm grasp of what Hegel really meant by the dissolution of art would, in fact, be a very strong interpretive tool in the contemporary art world. Of course, the test case for Hegel’s true relevance to contemporary art is the application of the Lectures on Aesthetics to Marcel Duchamp, because Duchamp is by common consent the ürsprung of the contemporary.[1] In addition, Duchamp’s own aesthetics-or anti-aesthetics-intersects with Hegel’s in a way that reveals much about art’s dissolution. Arguing strongly for the continuing relevance of the Lectures, Hegel’s philosophy of art illuminates Duchamp’s anti-art, and Duchamp’s work in turn illuminates Hegel’s aesthetics. Duchamp’s interest in Pyrrhonian philosophy invites an investigation of skepticism as it appears in the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, while the satirical aspects of Duchamp’s work recall Hegel’s treatment of Roman comedy. Furthermore, Duchamp’s reading of Max Stirner’s The Ego and its Own allows us to develop a Hegelian criticism of Duchamp’s work from an ethical perspective, immediately recalling the philosopher’s trenchant criticism of irony during the Romantic period.

[1]. For example, Kimball complains: “Almost everything championed as innovative in contemporary art is essentially a tired repetition of gestures inaugurated by the likes of Marcel Duchamp” (Kimball, 2008:27). The conservative position in art writing, for lack of a better word, generally frowns on contemporary art as lacking in aesthetic, moral, and spiritual value, but agrees with advocates of the contemporary on the central importance of Duchamp; “the post-1945 artists of Pop Art, Happenings, Op Art, Fluxus, Conceptual Art…all felt that Duchamp belonged to them, that he was their ‘prototype.’” Rudolf E. Kuenzli’s introduction to Marcel Duchamp, Artist of the Century Eds. Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann (Massachusetts; MIT, 1991) p. 1 Therefore Duchamp is blamed for contemporary artists who uncreatively follow in his footsteps, while the importance of Duchamp within in his own context is entirely missed.

Friday, February 13, 2015

Hegel's "End of Art:" Context and Interpretation

Jeff Koons, “Antiquity 3” (2011)

Oil on canvas, 259.1 x 350.5 cm

The main reason for the lack of clarity and the resulting conflicts of interpretation surrounding “the end of art” is that the term hasn’t yet been adequately placed within the larger contexts of Hegel’s system; in fact, his aesthetics is closely integrated with his work in logic and metaphysics, his ethical thought, his philosophy of religion and his theory of history. The systematic location of the Lectures on Fine Art, and therefore of art’s dissolution, has never been fully explicated. The lack of a more holistic approach to the theme of art’s dissolution has led to inaccurate accounts of that thesis, or at least resulted in creative misinterpretations.[1] That in turn has blocked the development of a genuinely Hegelian treatment of contemporary art. In order to grasp the full significance of Hegel’s aesthetics today, we need an understanding of how it fits into his philosophical system as a whole. As it appears in the Lectures of the 1820’s, the theme of art’s dissolution is extraordinarily nuanced, both in its internal structure and through its multifarious connections to related themes in Hegel’s other writings. The concept must be clarified through a close reading of the relevant passages within the wider context of Hegel’s philosophy as a whole: “any claim that philosophy displaces art must be understood in the context of Hegel’s entire philosophical system, and concentration simply on the Aesthetics is not sufficient for this purpose…art is produced within a larger hierarchical framework embracing law, the state, religion, and philosophy.”[2] It’s only through a holistic and integrative reading of the relevant texts that Hegel’s philosophy of art becomes clear, and only on the basis of a more detailed and more systematic reading of art’s dissolution will it become possible to apply it to the art of the present.[3]

[1]. Or, in Harold Bloom’s famous phrase, “productive misreadings;” see A Map of Misreading. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975) p. 75 and Kabbalah and Criticism. (New York: Seabury Press, 1975) p. 66. See also “The Necessity of Misreading” in Georgia Review (Winter2001/Spring2002) Vol. 55/56, No. 4/1 pp. 69-86. Not incidentally, Bloom referred to the current genre of the “poetry slam” as “the death of art.” See “The Man in the Back Row Has a Question VI ” in The Paris Review (Spring, 2000) Vol. , No. 154 p. 379

[2]. Brian K. Etter Between Transcendence and Historicism: The Ethical Nature of the Arts in Hegelian Aesthetics (Buffalo, New York: SUNY, 2006) p. 71

[3]. For good examples of systematic approaches to Hegel’s Aesthetics, see Cornelia A. Tsakiridou, “Darstellung: Reflections on Art, Logic, and System in Hegel” The Owl of Minerva Vol. 23, No. 1 (Fall 1991) pp. 15-28; Gustav E. Mueller, “The Function of Aesthetics in Hegel’s Philosophy” in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 5, No. 1. (September 1946), pp. 49-53; Richard Taft, “Art and Philosophy in the Early Development of Hegel’s System” in The Owl Of Minerva Vol.18, No. 2 (Spring 1987) pp. 145-162

Monday, February 9, 2015

The "End of Art:" an Ambiguous, Equivocal, Ambivalent Term.

Clearly, the “end of art” theme is very ambiguous, both within Hegel’s own writings and in terms of our own contemporary treatments; if “the end of art,” really was Hegel’s own theme, it was understood by him in a way very different from how we now understand it. Why, especially if no one today actually accepts Hegel’s philosophy in toto, do his Lectures on Fine Art continue to have such a strong influence on contemporary theory? And why is “the end of art” consistently invoked by critics and philosophers in order to address contemporary works produced more than a century after Hegel’s lectures were delivered, many of which would have baffled the account in the actual Lectures? Why is the “end of art” used to interpret works and developments that Hegel himself could never have foreseen, by people who are not Hegelians? Why is this ambiguous, equivocal, ambivalent term invoked to clarify what’s taking place in today’s artworld? How and why is all of this happening, and what are the consequences for philosophical aesthetics?

What, After All, is the "End of Art?"

Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882)

Oil on canvas, 96 cm × 130 cm (37.8 in × 51.2 in)

What exactly is “the end of art,” as Hegel understood it, and how is it understood now? The Lectures on Aesthetics (1823, 1826, and 1828-9)[1] develop a concept of art’s dissolution (Auflösung) (usually called the “end of art”) which is elusive and contradictory, but which nevertheless persists as one of the paradigmatic themes of today’s aesthetics and philosophy of art.[2] For, although the “end of art” is discussed with great interest, and although it’s a central concept for many of our leading philosophers and critics, the precise meaning of the expression remains unclear. As a result, despite numerous existing treatments of art’s dissolution, and despite its continued relevance for aesthetics and art criticism, there has as yet been no adequate application of Hegel’s aesthetics to contemporary art. Hegel’s several statements to the effect that “considered in its highest vocation, art is and remains for us a thing of the past” (Hegel, 1828-9/1998:11) are variously interpreted and remain deeply perplexing. Perhaps the “end of art” is so resilient precisely because of its equivocal, protean nature, its limitless flexibility: “The end of art could develop its remarkably durable effectiveness…because already in Hegel it is so densely surrounded by contradictions and inconsistencies that no consensus has yet been reached on whether there even is a Hegelian end of art.”[3]

[1]. G. W. F. Hegel Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. I Trans. T. M. Knox Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998 p. vi (cited hereafter as Hegel:1828-9/1998).

[2]. See, for current examples, David Carrier, “Warhol, Danto and the End of Art History” in Art US No. 26 (Fall, 2008) pp. 92-97 and Roger Kimball, “The End of Art” in First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life (Summer, 2008) No. 184 pp. 27-31

[3]. Eva Geulen The End of Art: Readings in a Rumor After Hegel Trans. James Mc. Farland (California: Stanford University Press, 2006) p. 8

Friday, October 24, 2014

Gestalt Psychology and Art History: Painting

Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Apples 1895-98

Oil on canvas; 68.8 x 92.7 cm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Schapiro clearly leans toward holism not only at the level of the milieu, but also at the level of the individual work: “a painting is…a concrete individual object; we grasp its parts immediately and sometimes simultaneously, all together as a whole, as we do an object in nature” (Schapiro, 1999:11-12). This may again reflect the influence of Gestalt psychology, which, as it happens, is a distinctively successful example of a holistic theory applied to an empirical and experimental science. Gestalt psychology assumes the concept of the lebenswelt and focuses on the perception of the living organism. Perceptual life is structured by relations of field and ground whereby organisms attend differentially to biologically relevant aspects of their environment. The organism is not reduced to the purely biotic processes within cells, tissues, and organs, like salt diffusing across semi-permeable membranes. Instead, Gestalt psychology takes the animal’s perceptual experience of its environs as an irreducible dimension of explanation. Schapiro applied the concept of field-ground relations in his 1969 discussion of the systematic unity of the artwork, where he addresses special problems pertaining to the perception of artworks:

…we have learned often enough how limited is our perception of such complex wholes as works of art…in an object as complex as a novel, a building, a picture, a sonata, our impression of the whole is a resultant or summation in which some elements can be changed with little apparent difference to our sense of the whole; perception of such complexities is rapid and tolerant, isolating certain features and passing freely over others, and admitting much vagueness for the sake of larger effects.[1]

[1]. Meyer Schapiro, “On Perfection, Coherence, and Unity of Form and Content” in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society (Selected Papers IV) George Brazilier, 1994 p. 37

Friday, September 26, 2014

Dissolution, not End: Dialectic and Hegel's Philosophy of Art

Andy Warhol, “Brillo Box” (1964)

Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on wood, 17 1/8 x 17 x 14" (43.3 x 43.2 x 36.5 cm)

MOMA, New York City

The dissolution of art is fundamentally related to concept of dialectical sublation, which is “one of the most important notions in all of Hegel”[1] for art has, in fact, been sublated. It is specifically with the irony of the Romantic period that art is supposed to have “come to an end” (in the sense indicated by Danto, for example); it has been cancelled and at the same time preserved, acting as the catalyst in the resolution of contradictory elements (reason and sensuality), and dissolving in the progress of that reaction. Hence the connection between Auflösung is aufheben. Hegel takes full advantage of the equivocal term Auflösung: literally, it means “to raise up something; however, as a philosophical notion it can mean ‘cancel’, ‘dissolve’, or ‘preserve’, or all three at once!” (Carter, 1980:94). Inwood says that the word “has three main senses: (1) ‘to raise, to hold, lift up” (2) ‘to annul, abolish, destroy, cancel, suspend’ (3) ‘to keep, save, preserve’…Hegel regularly uses all three senses at once.”[2] Similarly, Etter comments on “the difficulty of the German term aufheben, which may mean ‘to raise’, ‘to preserve’, or ‘to annul’-a profoundly plural ambiguity that Hegel exploits as the central explanatory term of his dialectical sense of history.”[3] It’s worth quoting Hegel’s Logic at length to get a sense of exactly what he intends by the term, and to understand its central importance:

To sublate, and the sublated (that which exists ideally as a moment), constitute one of the most important notions in philosophy. It is a fundamental determination which repeatedly occurs throughout the whole of philosophy, the meaning of which is to be clearly grasped and especially distinguished from nothing. What is sublated is not thereby reduced to nothing. Nothing is immediate; what is sublated, on the other hand, is the result of mediation; it is a non-being which has its origin in a being. It still has, therefore, in itself the determinateness from which it originates. “To sublate” has a twofold meaning in the [German] language: on the one hand it means to preserve, to maintain, and equally it also means to cause to cease, to put an end to. Even “to preserve” includes a negative element, namely, that something is removed from its immediacy and so from an existence which is open to external influences, in order to preserve it. Thus what is sublated is at the same time preserved; it has only lost its immediacy but is not on that account annihilated.[4]

[1]. Curtis L. Carter, “A Re-Examination of the ‘End of art” Interpretation of Hegel’s Aesthetics” in Art and Logic in Hegel’s Philosophy Warren E. Steinkraus; Kenneth L. Schmitz Humanities Press, 1980 p. 94

[2]. Michael Inwood A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1999) p. 283

[3]. Brian K. Etter Between Transcendence and Historicism: The Ethical Nature of the Arts in Hegelian Aesthetics (Buffalo: SUNY, 2006) p. 69

[4]. G. W. F. Hegel Science of Logic A.V. Miller, trans. (London and New York: George Allen and Unwin Ltd. And Humanities Press, 1969) pp. 106-7

Saturday, September 13, 2014

Art History as “Empirical Phenomenology”

Piet Mondrian, “Broadway Boogie-Woogie” 1943

Oil on canvas, 1.27 m x 1.27 m

Museum of Modern Art, New York City

Since art historical knowledge is just one of many registers of interpretation and self-interpretation available to artists, we have to have knowledge of more the more general historical and social world expressed by the aesthetic life of the period. The artists’ exposure to scientific theories of color, their interest in biological discoveries, their responses to developments in social life, their beliefs about synesthesia or mysticism, may all affect the form and content of the canvas. The holistic nature of art history means that any art historical study is forced to invoke all of the human sciences, including but not limited to the social sciences like psychology, anthropology, sociology and so forth. For example, Margolis describes Schapiro’s work as “centered on art history, but…more of a psychological discipline” and suggests that Schapiro practices a kind of “empirical phenomenology.”[1] This last remark indicates an Hegelian tendency to view one’s own interpretations as grounded in the practices and traditions that make up one’s milieu and the consequent problems of historicism, relativism and interpretation are opened up by that view. Each period appears to have its own aesthetic criteria and modes of artistic self-understanding, so the study of artworks demands singular combinations of disciplines in different cases.

[1]. Joseph Margolis, “Meyer Schapiro and the Science of Art History” in British Journal of Aesthetics (Summer, 1981) Vol. 21, No. 3 p. 242

Thursday, September 4, 2014

Modernism: Painting as Art Historical Practice

Pablo Picasso, Le Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)

Oil on canvas, 243.9 cm × 233.7 cm

Museum of Modern Art, New York City

In modern times the most direct relation is not between painter and nature, or the painter and the Holy Spirit, but the painter and other painters. Manet learned much from Velázquez both stylistically and in terms of content, which offers us a key to why he painted as he did. Cezanne closely followed Poussin’s rules for composition, both as an aesthetic and stylistic discipline and as a kind of patriotic gesture that would establish his place in the tradition of French painting. Picasso combined the most advanced stylistic elements available at the time, primitivism and cubism, and used them to depict the charged theme of prostitution in Le Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), perhaps in order to attain an optimal level of notoriety and secure the patronage of the Steins. In each case, a painter’s self-understanding and interpretation of his milieu enters into his choice of subject and technique. The painter’s explicit or implicit theorizing always has effects on the overall trajectory of his or her career, as well as effecting individual works. All of these examples show painters exercising art historical knowledge in their pursuit of a career and an identity as an artist, and all of them illustrate the need to distinguish between internal (or emic) and external (etic) modes of art historical explanation. Art history therefore has to be reflexive and historically sensitive with regard to epistemic questions, cross-disciplinary with regard to method, and pragmatic with regard to the relationship between theory and practice. Particularly in the modern period, when artists very deliberately and self-consciously interact with and react against each other and their traditions (Manet with Velázquez, Picasso with Matisse, Van Gogh with Gauguin), no reduction to causes and general laws is available. Painters and sculptors explain what they do, like other human beings, with reasons in form of the letters, journals, articles, lectures, and interviews they leave behind. Artists both cause and are caused by the styles and schools with which they are associated and according to which they are categorized, and their interrelations with the tradition and their contemporaries forms the background within which they struggle to produce art that is powerfully expressive, unique yet immediately communicative. Such reflexive causality may come to light in the biological sciences, but it’s far from Newtonian causation in the sense of an instance of a law. There simply is no causal account of the paintings and sculptures they create in the sense that there is a causal account of a planet’s course in its orbit.

Sunday, August 24, 2014

Modern Painting and Art History

Francis Bacon, Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953)

Oil on canvas, 153 cm × 118 cm

Des Moines Art Center, Iowa

Hegel famously said that we are all children of our times. In the context of art history, the implication is that we have to study the cultural conditions under which artworks are made in order to fully understand and appreciate them: “For, on account of its nature, at once material and individual, the work of art issues essentially from particular conditions of the most varied sort, amongst them especially the time and place of its origin, then the specific individuality of the artist, and above all the technical development of his art. Attention to all these aspects is indispensable for a distinct and thorough insight into, and acquaintance with, a work of art, and indeed for the enjoyment of it…” (Hegel, Aesthetics 1998, a34-5).

Hegel’s idea here is that art history starts with the dissolution of art, the condition under which our experience of artworks is mediated by theory. Once our experience of art is unhitched from its role in our sittlich (or “social-worldly”) religious practices, it becomes mediated by art historical knowledge. That’s true not only for the viewer but also for the painter, who in the modern period must act from some emic view of art history, some native sense of what the available moves are. Therefore our knowledge of any painting, but especially a modern one, must include the details of how the painter viewed art history and his or her location in it. So a full explanation of how a modern painting physically looks may often involve reference to the painter’s self-perception and self-interpretation. Painters deliberately engage in dialogue with other painters and artists, and it’s within this dialogue that any one personal effort makes sense. The work of an artist is now not to represent or transcend nature, nor merely to express their own times, but to find for themselves a location in art history.

Sunday, August 17, 2014

Art History, Classification, Singularity

Diego Velázquez, Las Meniñas 1656

Oil on canvas, 10' 5" x 9' 1" (3.2 m x 2.76 m)

Museo Nacional Del Prado

In art history, holism may involve the idea that the artist and his or her art are parts of the societies in which they live, which is a special case of the organic idea that changes in a part may spread systematically throughout a whole, just as changes in a whole can affect the parts. This is not an explanation, but a model for interpreting facts and seeing the connections among many discreet historical phenomena. There’s no point to criticizing holistic explanations, because there are none; there are only holistic models for coordinating facts and descriptions into classificatory or causal explanations. When we address the changes in style that characterize the history of Western art, we have to use the larger social context that was the background of an artist’s life. For example, as a court painter, Velázquez recorded the lives of Spanish royalty in the 1600’s, whereas Manet explored the anomic cultural conditions of Paris in the late 1800’s. From that perspective, the artist’s work becomes a personal expression of his or her culture. “Explanations of the perceptible features of a painting are at once both causal and interpretive, rendered chiefly case by singular case, but always with attention to prevailing personal and cultural practices.” (Joseph Margolis, “Works of Art as Physically Embodied and Culturally Emergent Entities” in British Journal of Aesthetics Vol. XIV, No. 3 (1974) p. 247)

Saturday, August 2, 2014

Art History and Holism Again: Meyer Schapiro

Alice Neel, Meyer Schapiro 1983

Oil on Canvas, 106.7 x 81.3 cm

The Jewish Museum, New York

Schapiro, then, acknowledges the relative and shifting nature of art’s history, and also the contingencies under which the discipline of art history operates: “The interpretation of the social contexts of art is conditioned by the aesthetic theory and social context of the interpreter.”[1] So we are perhaps justified in calling Schapiro a “methodological holist” because he holds that the “explanation of individual actions…may often have to be given partly in societal terms…that link individual behavior with types of social conditions.”[2] Again, we see here that methodological holism does not posit any agencies besides those embodied in actual persons, and so does not reduce the autonomy or minimize the uniqueness of the artist. After all, we see that Schapiro rejects a strictly causal account of changes in style, which would reduce something as complex as the development of abstraction to an instance under covering laws, as well as ontologically supervenient wholes like race or spirit (Schapiro, 1937:189). Schapiro, like Hegel and Margolis, seeks instead to locate the choices of individual persons within the matrix of the larger social and historical context, neither reducing nor reifying the greater whole. The whole is an emergent property.

[1] Meyer Schapiro, “Art and Social Change” in 1999:113

[2]. W. H. Dray, “Holism and Individualism in History and Social Science” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy Vol. IV Paul Edwards, ed. Macmillain, 1967 p. 54

Thursday, July 31, 2014

Modernism: Grand Narratives of Art History

André Masson, Battle of Fishes 1926

Sand, gesso, oil, pencil, and charcoal on canvas

(36.2 x 73 cm) MOMA

Wölfflin’s marginalization of Mannerism has a parallel in Barr and Greenberg, namely the marginalization of Surrealism in favor of abstract expressionism. In Barr’s case, working under the influence of Greenberg, this was reflected in the narrative structure of the hanging in the Museum of Modern Art, which seemed to lead inevitably from Cezanne’s Bather (1885) to Pollock’s Lavender Mist (1950). Surrealism was represented in two small rooms by a couple of Duchamps, two outstanding early Giacomettis and Masson’s Battle of the Fishes (1926). One irony here is that Duchamp was in not a Surrealist, but that it was Masson, as well as Duchamp, who was a Surrealist, who pioneered the automatism that climaxed in Pollock. It’s also true that even though Jean Arp was associated with the Surrealists, he could easily be located within the tradition of abstract, organic modern sculpture that includes Brancusi, Alexander Calder, and Henry Moore. It took the likes of Kirk Varnedoe, nearly 30 years after Barr, to experiment with an alternate program structured by themes instead of historical narrative, and it was ironically the Met, not MOMA, that finally displayed Pollock as a terminus of Surrealist automatism in the Desire Unbound exhibition in 2001. The point is that once a theory or narrative is adopted, the evidence may be made to fall into place by the rhetoric of museum display. The historical marginalization of Surrealism is reflected and reinforced by its physical marginalization. The parallel to the treatment of Mannerism is striking, as we’ll see later.

Schapiro concludes his discussion of the relationship between philosophy and painting by demanding a high level of detail in establishing that a particular worldview is reflected in painting at a given time, and a warning about overgeneralizing the particular mode of that reflection: The equation of the philosophy and painting requires specification of the traits, details, et cetera, of both the work and the worldview or philosophy. However, the constructability of links between them, whether historical or intellectual, is relevant only for a theory of the unity of philosophy and painting of a time and place, but not for a general theory of unified worldview in art and philosophy (Schapiro, 1958-68:71).

Monday, July 28, 2014

Duchamp’s Birthday 3: “...comedy leads to the dissolution of art altogether.” Hegel

Bicycle Wheel

New York, 1951 (third version, after lost original of 1913)

Metal wheel mounted on painted wood stool

51 x 25 x 16 1/2" (129.5 x 63.5 x 41.9 cm)

The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection

Today’s writers on Hegel’s Aesthetics generally leave out a curious and important feature of art’s dissolution, which is that “comedy leads to the dissolution of art altogether” (Knox’ translation, 1975:1236) taking the historical forms of satire (as the end of classical antiquity) and irony (as the dissolution of romantic art). The omission constitutes a missed opportunity to apply Hegel’s theory of art history to today’s artworld, because contemporary art is dominated by ironic and satirical modes. It is, in fact, Marcel Duchamp more than any other single artist who shifts the artworld from seriousness and sincerity to satire and irony. In fact, as I will argue, Duchamp’s innovation constitutes a synthesis of the satiric and ironic forms of art’s dissolution, and therefore inaugurates yet another period of dissolution, one from which we have not yet emerged. That’s how, as I’ve already suggested, a close reading of art’s dissolution would yield a genuinely Hegelian account of contemporary art from its inception among the Dadaists to the present time. In order to produce such a reading, it’s necessary to give a detailed treatment of the earlier satirical and ironic dissolutions.

Duchamp’s Birthday 2: Dissolution of art in Hegel

From a Hegelian perspective, Duchamp’s place in the development of the contemporary involves a synthesis of the satiric and ironic modes of art’s previous moments of dissolution. A Hegelian understanding of satire and irony, which are the specific forms taken by the dissolution of Classical and Christian art, will allow us to grasp historically, as a replaying and a synthesis of art’s previous dissolutions, the meaning of the peculiar narcissism, hermeticism and emptiness that afflict the contemporary artworld. That reading reworks the theme of art’s dissolution into an analytic tool, and saves the concept of “the end of art” from being a mere slogan, one charged with nostalgia and despair, but of little value as a term of art-historical and aesthetic understanding. Once we address art in terms a systematic reading of Hegel’s Lectures, we’ll finally be able to apply Hegel’s concept of art’s dissolution to the contemporary artworld by historically grasping the advent of Marcel Duchamp as a replaying of the moment of art’s dissolution. For better or for worse, it is in large part Duchamp’s synthesis of the satirical and ironic dissolutions of art that define contemporary art. The revised Hegelian approach that emerges is not merely critical of the contemporary, however, but is also equipped to understand and appreciate it, prepared to retain its most valuable possibilities, and thereby able to remain hopeful about what lies beyond.[1]

[1]. Duchamp’s “Rotorelief” disc (1923) from http://wnycradiolab.tumblr.com/post/32671593449/marcel-duchamp-rotoreliefs-duchamp-recognized

Happy Birthday, Marcel Duchamp! (1887-1968)

Marcel Duchamp, Monte Carlo Bond Paris 1924

The Museum of Modern Art, New York
photocollage on colored lithograph/letterpress,
mounted on flat cardboard holder
imitated, rectified readymade
31.5 x 19.5 cm

A firm grasp of what Hegel really meant by the dissolution of art would be a very strong interpretive tool in the contemporary art world. Of course, the test case for Hegel’s true relevance to contemporary art is the application of the Lectures on Aesthetics to Marcel Duchamp, because Duchamp is by common consent the ürsprung of the contemporary.[1] In addition, Duchamp’s own aesthetics-or anti-aesthetics-intersects with Hegel’s in a way that reveals much about art’s dissolution. Arguing strongly for the continuing relevance of the Lectures, Hegel’s philosophy of art illuminates Duchamp’s anti-art, and Duchamp’s work in turn illuminates Hegel’s aesthetics. Duchamp’s interest in Pyrrhonian philosophy invites an investigation of skepticism as it appears in the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, while the satirical aspects of Duchamp’s work recall Hegel’s treatment of Roman comedy. Furthermore, Duchamp’s reading of Max Stirner’s The Ego and its Own allows us to develop a Hegelian criticism of Duchamp’s work from an ethical perspective, immediately recalling the philosopher’s trenchant criticism of irony during the Romantic period.