Well, that sounds like you are agreeing with my distinction. When I say "immediate," I mean that there is no transport to the "realm of ideas" via representation itself, what is shown in such work doesn't denote any particular idea at all. Perhaps "immediate"wasn't the best choice of words.

I agree representational art is "immediate" in the sense of it immediately puts one in the space or a represented meaning. There I was just using the world to point out the absence of the layer of representational meaning in non-representational work.

Yes, I agree. What they're doing is, I often feel, a bad way of doing philosophy as well as a bad way of doing art. — jamalrob

At this point I feel like saying: "It's art Jam, but not as you know it." The comparison to life through reference is apt. When we seek to define art, we are ultimately decreeing what expression in objects is worthwhile, we are stating what meaning in conjunction with a created object deserves to live, and which is so empty of value it is best it is wiped out.

Conceptual art is, I would argue, fruitful in many ways. It is just it can be difficult to get into from a position of art criticism, as everyone worries too much about what art is meant to be saying. Interestingly, the professed focus of conceptual art ends to shoot itself in the foot here. Successful conceptual are is actually about the object as much as anything else.

The reason conceptual artists don't "just write a book" is because they are interested in the intersection of meaning with an object. What the object does, that it is there, associated with the particular meaning of the idea, is the point. Worthwhile expression found in the moment meaning is expressed with an object, with no need for any denoting representation. An act of making and association, of stacking boxes on top of each other and proclaiming it explores the rigid complexity of growing garden, is all it takes. It's an object in a moment of expression. And this is worthwhile having. It is a pure concern for moment of an object and an associated expression.

To fully appreciate conceptual art, one actually has to turn away from the supposed idea and back to the object. Not only does it draw attention to what is actually important to conceptual art (meaning and THIS object, together, NOW), but it also points towards the aesthetics pleasures to be found in conceptual art. Once the object is granted primary place, it presence and everything which goes with it (i.e. looks, colours, smells,etc., etc.) becomes of value. There can't be the relevant intersection of meaning and object without the object. To give-up anything about the object is to destroy the celebrated moment of the work. If we stick a chair on display, it isn't a question of: "The chair is pretty because of X (e.g. design or craftsmanship)," rather is only "The chair is pretty" by existing in this context as itself. The chair doesn't need to say anything in particular or need anything more. It is valuable, is art, by it merely being object in a moment of expressing meaning.

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Posted to wrong thread. Not sure how to delete.

personally I don't like the urinal — Agustino

And what have you got against urinals?

I do agree with Thorongil that it does not give me an aesthetic experience which makes my mind come to a halt and become fully present, with no will, passions, or desires left. — Agustino

I'm not sure when or if I experienced such a reaction to art, but... take yourself back to 1917 to the New York Armory show in which the urinal it's first and last appearance as a one-off shockeroo. it might very well have stopped any number of people in their tracks.

Notwithstanding the Kohler Company's strenuous efforts in Sheboygan, Wisconsin to turn out lovely urinals and toilet bowels, proving the attractiveness of toilet fixtures wasn't Duchamp's objective. It's been a while since I read up on the subject, but it seems to me that Duchamp was saying something about the art business, the critics, the artists, the show, and related matters. He was, sort of, a la Three Stooges giving them the finger. Among other things. Like democratizing art.

If I declare that something is art, then it is art. Maybe he found the urinal in a trash heap. Or in a hardware store -- don't know. But found objects was another one of his schticks. Put together an assemblage of odds and ends found here and there... It can look like a pile of trash or quite interesting. Sublime... hmmm, maybe not. But I haven't seen everything, yet.

Most of the art created after this date irritates me. So I freely admit my knowledge of art history is largely determined by the art I like. — Thorongil

But realistic figurative work continued after 1920... Have you sampled "magic realism"? Here's a sample by Paul Cadmus, Fleets In, 1934. It was commissioned by the US Navy who were initially shocked and appalled and buried it somewhere. Now it hangs in their headquarters building.


Cadmus continued to paint in a realistic style into the late 20th century, as did quite a few artists. (Some sniveling-worm critics will, of course, say that anything realistic is merely derivative and of no aesthetic significance.)

What do you take representational art to be representing? For me, the key idea behind Abstract Expressionism, is that all art is, in the final analysis, presentation, and thus by implication, non-representational.

There is a trivial sense in which it is commonly thought that a photograph represents a scene, and philosophically implicit in that idea is the tacit notion that scenes, as experienced, are true and accurate representations of the world and are the manifest half of a kind of bilateral symmetry.

If all art is non-representational, and consists, rather than in representing anything, in diverse kinds of presentings of dispositions, moods and ideas, (music being the archetypal exemplar) then Abstract Expressionism is the form of art most self-consciously formal; wherein the aim is to dissolve the form/content distinction altogether, to bring about an ecstasis in the artist and the viewer, by eliminating the traditional signs that are so prone to invoke reificational fantasies. The move to abstraction in art is, for me, related above all to phenomenology and hermeneutics, where seeing is always understood to be an interpretative act, as seeing as, and not as representing anything.
This is born out by Heidegger's interest in Van Gogh and Cezanne and Merleau-Ponty's interest in Cezanne. Cezanne and Van Gogh are, arguably, the most exemplary twin forefathers of abstraction in the visual arts. As an aside, I think 'abstraction" is itself an unfortunate term because it suggests a kind of conceptual attenuation, away from sensory experience, whereas all art [except perhaps in some senses what is called 'conceptual art'] is concerned with sensory experience and Abstract Expressionism is so in the most concrete and immanent way. In this connection think of Cezanne's statement about nature 'thinking itself though him' and Pollock's comment to an interviewer who said "you do not work from nature". His comment was "I am nature".

Of course with the familiarization that comes with time and institutionalization the most self-consciously non-representational works come to invoke their own reificational fantasies, and it becomes increasingly difficult to look at them with fresh eyes, and as we would expect the very same phenomenon happens with music.

And what have you got against urinals? — Bitter Crank

Nothing, just not a source of aesthetical experience. Sure, it may have a political message, but in my opinion, that is not art. The purpose of art is to provide me with an aesthetic experience.

I'm not sure when or if I experienced such a reaction to art, but... take yourself back to 1917 to the New York Armory show in which the urinal it's first and last appearance as a one-off shockeroo. it might very well have stopped any number of people in their tracks. — Bitter Crank

Well something can shock me in the sense that I'm like "WTF!". But that certainly is not the same thing as the reaction of awe I sometimes have when looking at art. The former isn't an aesthetic experience.

Like democratizing art. If I declare that something is art, then it is art. — Bitter Crank

Yes, and this is precisely what I disagree with. Not everyone is an artist, and not anything counts as art. This is, in Nietzsche's language, slave morality at its best.

@Thorongil
I wasn't planning on getting involved with this conversation as I don't know much about art. I was just listening to danielcoffeens podcast episode - Deleuze and Guattari's 'What is Philosophy' and he spoke specifically about Pollack and comparing it to the way we think of philosophy.

I remembered just how strange philosophy is, you know, and you can say you really get Deleuze and Guattari or your really get Nietzsche. But there are enormous components that I find incomprehensible and bizarre and have no frikkin Idea what they are talking about. That's true with every philosopher for everybody. You know, for the greatest Kantian expert there are still moments that are just strange, you might have an explanation about what's going on there but the fact is every philosophy is very strange. Only through the institutional practices of normalizing it does it become something we can even talk about sanely and not sound like lunatics.

It's the same with art, you look at Pollack and he is scattering this paint on a canvas and your thinking 'what the hell are you doing dude, what the hell are you doing?' Or your look at an elaborate luscious classical scene of rape which seems to be a very common theme to a certain time... What a strange thing to do. But within an institution of art, somehow within this field of immanence or the field of affective perceptual practice that Pollack operates in, scattering paint on a canvas, putting the canvas on the floor, not looking at anything but the canvas right, not looking at an object to portray it. Overcoming all mimetic aspects or components of art, just to make art an event of splattering paint on a canvas over and against any object, the object is the paint, the object is the canvas right. There is no other object other than the act of painting, well that makes perfect sense from the perspective of Jackson Pollack and studying the history of modern art we can say 'yes, this make sense'. It's the same with philosophy, philosophy is very strange it's very personal it's very idiosyncratic... — Rough Transcription

In this way it makes sense specifically as a reaction, comment or overcoming of your view that art needs to be representational.

It's the same with art, you look at a pollack and he is scattering this paint on a canvas and your thinking 'what the hell are you doing dood, what the hell are you doing?' — Rough Transcription

I suspect that for abstract expressionists, and people like Pollock in particular, it's "doing the art" that is the crux of the matter -- and that part only the artist gets to experience. That's probably true for a sculpture and a block of marble too. Looking at a figure of marble will be nothing like the experience of carving the statue from marble.

Did they (as I have sort of always supposed) try to 'communicate' via their art at all and if so... why didn't they simply write a book or just say what they had in mind rather than to go to all the trouble of making us sort of 'feel their intentions' via paint of a canvas? — Mayor of Simpleton

They communicate, certainly, but what they communicate are not concepts, as one finds contained in books. They communicate the Ideas, or universals, of the particulars of which they paint. An Idea is not the same as a concept. Concepts do not transport us out of time, as happens in aesthetic experience, only Ideas do, seeing as they do not exist in time. Hence, "conceptual" art is a contradiction in terms.

Not all art is for everyone...

... I can live with that.

Can you? — Mayor of Simpleton

Sure, but some things purported to be art I do not find to be art. Can you live with definitions that clearly demarcate the limits of concepts? A definition that includes everything is no definition at all. I do not mean to denigrate the creations of Duchamp et al, but I do mean to exclude them from what it means to be art.

To be fair...

... any realist after the invention of the camera should have just take an photo and saved us the effort of bothering to look at their efforts of representation, eh? — Mayor of Simpleton

No, for again, what is being represented is not the representation of a representation, but the Idea of a representation.

By the way, why did you include a maddening amount of ellipses in your post?

Okay, good to hear!

I was speaking in generalities.

What do you take representational art to be representing? — John

The Platonic Idea.

In this way it makes sense specifically as a reaction, comment or overcoming of your view that art needs to be representational. — shmik

To be honest, the quote is unclear to me, so I can't honestly say how much it does in overcoming my conception of art.

I don't understand how it can make sense to say that the Platonic Ideas can be represented. Plato certainly didn't think so. He said that life 'imitates' (by which he meant not 'represents' but 'is a pale shadow of') the Idea and that Art imitates life. In any case, even if life could be said to represent the Ideas, and art to represent life; it still could not be said that art could immediately represent the Ideas.

I think Schopenhauer's use of the Ideas in his aesthetic theory is a vapid distortion of Platonism, and is more properly founded on other ideas; for one example, the more robust Romantic notion of art conveying intimations of the infinite and eternal, the kinds of idea which had already been entertained by Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge.

Or for another example, Spinoza's notion of seeing things sub specie aeternitatis (
under the aspect of eternity).

To be honest, the quote is unclear to me, so I can't honestly say how much it does in overcoming my conception of art. — Thorongil

Well it's not about overcoming it with any sort of proof or argument. Rather it's a statement about trying to understand art whilst ignoring the point of view of the artist. That even though it's strange does not make it random and meaningless. Also that it's possible to have an appreciation of it even if it doesn't make sense to us.

Personally I think your view is extremely strange, much more than a piece canvas splattered with paint. Outside of the context of the philosophical tradition, I could write off the concept of platonic ideas as some kind of madness or mysticism. Yet I can still count it as philosophy (rather than mysticism) because I can situate it as part of a tradition and I can try to understand the view you are coming from.

Again this not an argument against your position. I can't argue against your position, its too incongruous with mine.

I think the Pollock example is a detail of a painting, not an entire painting. If that is relevant...

I don't have the original hanging over my couch, (his stuff sells in the multiples of millions $$$) but as far as I know, the image in the OP is of the whole picture.

In 1963 Robert Rauschenberg was on a bus trip in Texas, touring with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. He was the art director. Here is his statement about his art. http://post.at.moma.org/sources/18/publications/274

FIND IT NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE FREE ICE TO WRITE ABOUT JEEPAXLE MY WORK. THE CONCEPT I PLANTATARIUM [sic] STRUGGLE TO DEAL WITH KETCHUP IS OPPOED [author’s note: the s has been dropped from “opposed”] TO THE LOGICAL CONTINUITY LIFT TAB INHERENT IN LANGUAGE HORSES AND COMMUNICATION.

MY FASCINATION WITH IMAGES OPEN 24 HRS. IS BASED ON THE COMPLEX INTERLOCKING OF DISPARATE VISUAL FACTS HEATED POOL THAT HAVE NO RESPECT FOR GRAMMAR. THE FORM THEN DENVER 39 IS SECOND HAND TO NOTHING. THE WORK THEN HAS A CHANCE TO ELECTRIC SERVICE BECOME ITS OWN CLICHÉ. LUGGAGE. THIS IS THE INEVITABLE FATE FAIR GROUND OF ANY INANIMATE OBJECT FREIGHTWAYS.

His art statement makes use of his art method. The images he saw on the road entered his text, much in the same way images enter his canvases.

I don't understand how it can make sense to say that the Platonic Ideas can be represented. — John

I don't believe I said or implied that, and if I did, my apologies for the unclarity. The Ideas are not represented in art, but rather experienced by means of art. Art is, as it were, a reliable catalyst for experiencing them. As I said in an earlier post, literally anything can inspire contemplation of the Ideas, but art rather uniquely does this better than most things. The primary way it does this, I would submit, is because, as a representation of the world, a piece of art is one step removed from our ordinary experience of the world. In this way, we do not react the same way to a painting of a man as we do to an actual man. The latter involves all kinds of subtle, instinctual, and emotive responses, whereas the former does not or need not. The painting allows one to intellectually contemplate the man free from the constraints of embodied interaction, and in this way, uncover the Idea behind him.

I think Schopenhauer's use of the Ideas in his aesthetic theory is a vapid distortion of Platonism — John

I don't see what's so vapid about it. He's using the term as Plato does, but of course the status of the Ideas in his system is very different than in Plato's (they serve a different function). Again, I don't see a problem with this.

On the face of it, abstract art seems even more naturally suited to channel a perception or contemplation of the Ideas than representational art is. The Ideas are abstract objects, after all. The peace and purity of a Mondrian painting, for example, is far removed from the strivings, pleasures and sufferings in, say, Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights".

While it sounds like a nice parallel, I don't think it works that way. A representation is necessary as an identifiable landmark or guidepost which can then spark the contemplation of the Idea. It serves as a gentle push to start one on one's way towards said contemplation. An abstract creation is not identifiable by definition and so would only arouse confusion. There are, more importantly, no Ideas for abstractions. I am (and Schopenhauer is too) a nominalist with respect to them. Ideas are only of natural kinds. Nor are they (the Ideas) abstractions, as you suggest, if by this you mean concepts, since they can be perceived as opposed to being conceived.

Personally I find abstract art far less confusing than figurative art. Confronted with a scene by Caravaggio, for instance, I struggle to work out what's going on, interpret the facial expressions, and know what I am supposed to be thinking about it. In appreciating the painting, what it is about is of secondary importance to me than its purely formal aspects; it is the latter that makes Caravaggio's paintings so gorgeous and so important.

What do you take representational art to be representing? — John


Thorongil: The Platonic Idea. — Thorongil

I don't believe I said or implied that, and if I did, my apologies for the unclarity. — Thorongil

No problems, Thorongil, we all misspeak at times.

I do think there is something in your clarification of what you meant; namely that artworks may invite us to reflect on things in ways that everyday things may not. But I do not believe that it could make sense to say that the Ideas can be contemplated, because they are by definition beyond any and all interpretations and perspectives, and artworks, by contrast, seem to be the very things that are paradigmatically the most interpretative and perspectival.

Having said that I do believe that artworks are capable of evoking a sense of the numinous and the mystical. I think the numinous and the mystical are always matters of affect though, and not of intellect, and that would be where I depart from Plato's Ideas, or even Spinoza's sub specie aeternitatis. I think Kant was right that there is no intellectual intuition in those kinds of senses.

I agree with this very much. Although I do want to make a caveat that I think the best Abstract (and in a less obvious sense so-called representational) art treads the phenomenological line of ambiguity between 'raw sense' and 'seeing as'. There is always an equivocal reference to the world; as if to point out the impossibility of the phenomenological reduction.

Yes indeed. There is much more than mere line, colour, texture and so on in most abstract paintings, and I haven't done justice to that in my comments so far. But the representation is general, as it is in (absolute) music: while not about anything in particular, music can represent tension and release, climax and decay, chaos and order, solidity and ethereality, surprise, etc.

Actually it is a detail. If you click on the following link and scroll about 75% of the way down the page you will find it. It is captioned "NUMBER 8" (Detail)

And just where do you draw the line between the figurative and the abstract? What do you think of these landscapes by Turner, Cézanne, and Strindberg? — jamalrob

I just saw that you have already made the point about the difficulty of rigidly classing paintings as 'representational' and 'non-representational'.

music can represent tension and release, climax and decay, chaos and order, solidity and ethereality, surprise, etc. — jamalrob

Yes, and I would contend that painting can also represent those, even the ones that we generally take to be ineluctably diachronic. Still, I agree with your earlier comment that music generally has a greater affective range than the plastic arts (broadly conceived), although I have heard that people regularly weep in front of Rothko's works.

Did they (as I have sort of always supposed) try to 'communicate' via their art at all and if so... why didn't they simply write a book or just say what they had in mind rather than to go to all the trouble of making us sort of 'feel their intentions' via paint of a canvas? — Mayor of Simpleton

They communicate, certainly, but what they communicate are not concepts, as one finds contained in books. They communicate the Ideas, or universals, of the particulars of which they paint. An Idea is not the same as a concept. Concepts do not transport us out of time, as happens in aesthetic experience, only Ideas do, seeing as they do not exist in time. Hence, "conceptual" art is a contradiction in terms. — Thorongil

There seems to be an indication of what an 'aesthetic experience' is or perhaps must be going on here.

Care to expand on that notion?

As for what they communicate not being concepts found in books, would that not depend upon the books one reads?

Have you considered that the concepts that do not 'transport you out of time' might have less to do with the concepts, but more to do with you in particular?

Could you imagine that these concepts may well indeed 'transport one (other than yourself) out of time'?

Not all art is for everyone...

... I can live with that.

Can you? — Mayor of Simpleton

Sure, but some things purported to be art I do not find to be art. Can you live with definitions that clearly demarcate the limits of concepts? A definition that includes everything is no definition at all. I do not mean to denigrate the creations of Duchamp et al, but I do mean to exclude them from what it means to be art. — Thorongil

I can live with you believing that this is a definition that allows/commands art to adhere to the limitations you wish to impose upon art, but I fail to see why I should be compelled to accept this limitation are more than self-imposed demarcations by yourself and should apply to any other standard of measure that is not your own.

Indeed I include much more as art and there is a great deal of what is considered to be art that I have no real aesthetic experience when I am confronted with it, but I fail to see that I am the factor that determines what is an what is not art for anyone other than myself.

Then again...

... this has probably more a fundamental ground to it in that I reject idealism and embrace relativism. I feel you cannot, nor can I or anyone else, fully define what is and is not art.

-----------------------------------

btw... the 'maddening' number of ellipses in my posts have more to do with these concepts/notions ellipsed (as I see it) are far from agreed upon concepts/notions, just as I'm not too sure what is so 'maddening' about ellipses; thus fail to endorse that the ellipses are indeed maddening. In short... the notions are relative and I really fail to see any universal or absolute understanding of those concepts/notions.

If this helps...

... I also fail to see how anyone can answer the title question in the OP, as the notion of 'should' is rather limiting; thus I cannot endorse any 'shoulds' when it comes to an aesthetic (personal) experience.

Sorry to say, but I view certainty or truth as a process of adaptations and not as static universal/absolute values.

Meow!

GREG