Aesthetics: Image, Artwork, and Truth

www.artintheage.com

2009-12-14T19:10:00.000-08:00

I know class is over but there is a boutique in philidelphia called Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility and they sell a Water Benjamin tote bag.

Had to share.

War

2009-12-10T19:53:00.000-08:00

I wanted to address the comments brought up in class after we viewed the documentary on Abu Ghraib. A couple students mentioned that “war changes everything” was not a valid response to the accusations against the soldiers in the documentary. I do not believe that their actions are excusable nor will I argue that their charges should be dropped in this post. I would, however, like to point out how different war is from ordinary life. Having a number of people in my family serving in the armed forces, I have come to understand how difficult the lives of soldiers are. My cousin, in particular, served at a FOB (Forward Operating Base) in the heart of Baghdad. The base was about the size of two football fields side by side. If anyone left the FOB, they ran the risk of getting shot at or blown up. He was stationed in a hostile country for twelve months. When he was on patrol duty in the streets, he worked shifts that lasted anywhere between twelve and fifteen hours. Most of the time he was only left with sticks of beef jerky to satisfy his hunger. After my cousin spent his first tour on the base, he had to serve a second tour in a location out of the city. His situation didn’t improve much. He was given the responsibility of guarding convoys in and out of Baghdad. One of the toughest challenges he faced was avoiding the IEDs (Improvised Explosive Device) used to limit the military’s mobility. Unfortunately, he rode in a vehicle at the front of the pack. A disadvantage of being in this position was running over these explosives, which was a frequent occurrence. In six months he escorted over ninety convoys and came back with visions of other soldiers getting their legs blown off by these devices or having their bodies completely shredded. These images, along with the possibility that you could get blown up at any minute, eventually takes its toll on the mind. It creates pressure and a tremendous amount of stress. The soldiers in the video were in similar conditions. One of the soldiers mentioned a mortar coming through the roof and landing at his feet. Technically, this soldier should now be either in a wheel chair or in the ground. I imagine that he didn’t take the situation very lightly. Not only did the soldiers have people shooting at them from outside, they also had to deal with attacks from within the base. Although they seemed to have the situation under control, there was an instance when one of the prisoners came into possession of a firearm and shot one of the patrolling soldiers. The soldiers stationed at Abu Ghraib were forced to work and live in an extremely unsafe environment. Like my cousin, they were surrounded with life threatening situations and horrific images of their fellow soldiers getting maimed and killed. It is likely that these living conditions would have a severe effect on their minds. In addition, a number of the people who were criticized for their behavior were serving as MP (Military Police). Generally, soldiers classified as MP were trained to direct traffic and handle domestic disputes. These soldiers were young, inexperienced, and not trained to carry out the job they were assigned at the prison. The military originally argued that they were “rogue” soldiers and that they were acting on their own, but further investigation showed that the soldiers charged were given orders from their superiors. There was intentional policy concerning how the prisoners should be treated and the orders came from commanding officers. In the army, if you do not follow the orders of your superiors, you run the risk of getting you and your fellow soldiers killed. Soldiers who do not follow commands are often thrown out of the military or even thrown in prison. There was a failure of command at Abu Ghraib. The superior officers gave the soldiers commands, but they were not appropriate for the prison’s management. Yes, by their actions the soldiers participated in cruel and unusual activities, but we can only place so much of the blame on them. The real investigation should have been conducted against their superior officers and the government agencies involved in the incident. The pressure and stress associated with their job also played a significant role in the treatment of the prisoners. Once again, this does not give the soldiers any excuse for what they did, but it is important to understand the significance of the situation and the relationship dynamics between them and their superiors.

WWII veteran had Hitler's art book on bookshelf

2009-12-09T11:35:00.000-08:00

By JAMIE STENGLE, Associated Press Writer Jamie Stengle, Associated Press Writer – 12-9-09

DALLAS – After fighting his way across Europe during World War II, John Pistone was among the U.S. soldiers who entered Adolf Hitler's home nestled in the Bavarian Alps as the war came to a close.

Making his way through the Berghof, Hitler's home near Berchtesgaden, Germany, Pistone noticed a table with shelves underneath. Exhilarated by the certainty of victory over the Nazis, Pistone took an album filled with photographs of paintings as a souvenir.

"It was really a great feeling to be there and we knew, by that time, he was on his last leg," Pistone told The Associated Press.

Sixty-four years after Pistone brought the album home to Ohio, the 87-year-old has learned its full significance: It's part of a series compiled for Hitler featuring art he wanted for his "Fuhrermuseum," a planned museum in Linz, Austria, Hitler's hometown.

Pistone's album is expected to be formally returned to Germany in a ceremony at the U.S. State Department in January. Germany has 19 other albums discovered at the Berchtesgaden complex that are part of a 31-album collection of works either destined for or being considered for the Linz museum.

Pistone's 3-inch thick, 12-pound album's journey from obscurity began this fall when a friend became curious about the book sitting on Pistone's bookshelf.

The friend discovered after some Internet searching that the Dallas-based Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art was involved in 2007 in the restitution of two other albums that were part of a series documenting art stolen by the Nazis from Jewish families.

Its founder, Robert Edsel, who while living in Italy for a time after selling his oil and gas business became interested in what was done to protect art in World War II, traveled to Ohio this fall to examine Pistone's album. Seeing it convinced him that Pistone had one of the missing albums of the series on the planned museum.

Stamped on the album's spine is "Gemaldegalerie Linz" — Gemaldegalerie means picture gallery in German — and the Roman numerals for 13. It still has a sticker from the book's binder in Dresden.

Birgit Schwarz, a German art historian from Vienna who has written books about Hitler and art, including a book called "Hitler's Museum" describing the albums in the series, is convinced the album is authentic. She said she recognized paintings in the album along with the volume number and title.

"It's absolutely clear!" she wrote in an enthusiastic e-mail to the AP after reviewing scanned photographs of the album. "Hans Makart's 'Pest in Florenz' (Plague in Florence), for example, the first picture of album XIII, Hitler got as a gift from Mussolini!"

Souvenir hunting was routine by soldiers during the war, and problems arise when people try to sell rather than return culturally important items, said Thomas R. Kline, a Washington-based lawyer who specializes in art restitution and works for the foundation.

"It's really important that as people go through their attics and they find the things that grandpa brought home, people are aware that something as simple as a book of pictures could have a cultural significance," Kline said.

Ambassador J. Christian Kennedy, special envoy for Holocaust issues at the State Department, said the agency is happy to help return objects taken during the war. "This is all about doing the right thing," Kennedy said.

Edsel started his foundation in 2007 to honor and continue the work of the original Monuments Men, the roughly 345 men and women from 13 nations who helped Allied forces protect cultural treasures during World War II. After the war, they began trying to find the rightful owners of pieces of art looted by the Nazis, hundreds of thousands of which are still missing.

"It's my desire to see the works of the Monuments Men completed," said Edsel, who wrote two books detailing the group's work.

The discovery of albums could help. In Pistone's case, experts had the names of artwork featured in his album but the photographs could help match them to the correct piece of art, Edsel said.

"They are key documents from the crime scene," he said of the albums.

He said the art Hitler wanted for his museum was bought, stolen or confiscated. The 13th album contains works by some of Hitler's favorite German painters, including a photo of Adolf von Menzel's painting of Frederick the Great that hung in Hitler's office in Munich.

Edsel said his office gets about a call a day from someone curious about an item brought home after the war.

"We're looking for people with goodwill who don't know what they have," Edsel said.

Pistone, album in hand, returned home after surviving the battlefields in Europe. He finished college, got into the restaurant business and had five children. The album mostly stayed up on a shelf at his home in Beachwood, Ohio, but he'd occasionally take it down and let family members look through it.

Once he met Edsel and learned about the Monuments Men, he knew it should be returned to Germany. "I just wanted to get it in the right hands," he said.

Before the book makes the trip overseas, it and one of two other albums the foundation helped discover will go on display for about three months at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans following the State Department ceremony, Edsel said.

Edsel said that of the two albums from 2007, one has already been donated to the U.S. National Archives to join the other albums in that series used as evidence of Nazi looting in the Nuremberg trials. He said that the second will go to the National Archives in the next three years.

"When soldiers and their families realize what they have and come forward to return it, there's never an issue. It's a happy moment and there's celebrations of one kind of another," Kline said. "We owe a huge debt to this generation that saved the world from Naziism."

___

Stengle, Jamie. "WWII veteran had Hitler's art book on bookshelf - Yahoo! News." Yahoo! News. Web. 09 Dec. 2009. .

Objective Art

2009-12-08T16:07:00.000-08:00

So Jon Rafman, an artist, is taking images of people captured on Google street view and blowing them up, presenting them as artworks. Here's a Rafman quote from this Gizmodo post about the artworks:

The world captured by Google appears to be more truthful and more transparent because of the weight accorded to external reality, the perception of a neutral, unbiased recording, and even the vastness of the project.

Now, I obviously have some misgivings about the potential objectivity of anything, much less something as subjective as art, but this is about the closest thing to it that I can think of; the pictures on Google street view are taken by a nine-lensed camera mounted to the roof of a car. As far as I can tell, it's an automated system; there's no real agency aside from the driver's choice of where and when to drive (and, if you look through the gallery, you'll see that there's no way a driver could have predicted some of this stuff).

Jeez, what would Benjamin think? This goes way beyond mechanical reproducibility. Of course, we have to realize that not every image taken by the Google cams reach the same aesthetic levels. It seems, then, that the "art" aspect really comes from the artist's selection of the images more than the images being taken themselves.

links

2009-12-06T08:11:00.001-08:00

hey yall -- here's a few recent articles about art's merging with technology and politics.

"Why not everyone is a torturer": Complicating the"easier" readings of Millgram and Zimbardo

2009-12-04T14:01:00.001-08:00

Here's an interesting BBC article written by two psychologists detailing how their research speaks to recent events in Abu Ghirab and also complicates most earlier interpretations of the Zimbardo & Millgram experiments. These earlier interpretations essentially contend something like "if we all shared the same circumstances as the soldiers working the prison, we all would have ended up doing basically the same thing."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3700209.stm

Certainly these newer studies don't invalidate the results of the Zimardo or Millgram experiments. What they do is caution us against reaching very broad and simplistic conclusions from the experiments. Unfortunately, answers to difficult problems are rarely simple and often times a nuanced picture or solution ends up being a closer approximation to the truth than one that is painted in grand, but broad strokes. I think Dr. J's reading of those experiment's significance is generally correct: "Basically what those experiments showed was that under certain conditions--primarily conditions that exploited people's trust and confidence in authority figures--some people might forgo their independent moral standards. The studies did not show that we all would do it, nor did they show that any of us could do it in a situation in which we had to make the independent decision to do so."

I need to give Dr. Johnson practically all the credit for the information contained in this blog post. If you want to read Dr. J's original blog post on torture, where this info came from,you can do so here: http://readmorewritemorethinkmorebemore.blogspot.com/2009/05/torture-101.html

Zimbardo + Abu Ghraib

2009-12-04T08:40:00.000-08:00

A book I read a few years back seems relevant to our discussion of the Abu Ghraib cases. Philip Zimbardo (best known for his Stanford Prison Experiment) put out a book, "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil" after testifying at the trial of Staff Sgt Ivan “Chip” Frederick II, one of the Abu Ghraib defendants. Zimbardo argued the lessons learned from SPE: A bad system produces bad situations in which people act badly without even necessarily knowing why. The court martial rejected his testimony, claiming Abu Ghraib was an aberration. Frederick – an army reservist – was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment and stripped of nine medals and 22 years’ retirement pay. The standard line on Abu Ghraib held true, "a few rotten apples can taint the whole barrel," bracketing out the possibility of changing the prison structure, the prison situation that Zimbardo tried to argue caused the behavior.

----

EDIT: Zimbardo's Hero Project centers around the study of the banality of heroism, aiming to be an "international organization to promote heroism as an antidote to evil and as a celebration of what is best in human nature," and "to internalize the perspective, 'That when I become aware of the need to act on behalf of others needing help or being the victim of evil forces, I will be ready and able to take the necessary action.'” If you want to be a Zimbardo "hero-in-waiting," it looks like you can sign up here (looks like Anderson Cooper did!).

notable post on the Hero Construction Company Blog: "Cameras and Heroes" -- "the camera really did change the way we behaved... and they weren't even real cameras!"

Tragedy and the Sublime

2009-12-03T02:42:00.000-08:00

In Poetics, Aristotle discusses the imitative art of poetry. Aristotle explains that the origin of poetry is due to two specific parts of human nature. Not only is imitation delightful to man, but it is also natural to man from birth. Although Aristotle defines epic poetry, comedy, and lyre-playing as modes of imitation, he largely focuses on the tragedy as his topic of discussion. Aristotle believes that tragedy is the formal perfection of art because it contains the six elements of art, including Plot, Characters, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, and Melody (Hofstadter 103). Of these six features, the “life and soul” of the tragedy involves the plot and the characters. Aristotle explains the, when constructing the plot, the both of these elements must be consistent and probable in order for the audience to understand how the tragedy unfolds. In addition, the poet must make the character good, appropriate, and based on reality (Hofstadter 112). He also explains that the plot must also have a logical progression. A tragic work is only considered “beautiful,” if it “presents a certain order in its arrangement of parts” (Hofstadter 105).

Aristotle also defines the aim of the poet when constructing a tragedy and the conditions that are necessary for the tragic effect to occur. The reality of the plot and characters must “draw” the audience in and allow the audience the feel as if they could participate in the plot themselves. Once the tragedy has attracted the audience, the characters must imitate actions to arouse pity and fear within the audience. Aristotle explains that the “perfect” plot displays a good man’s fall from fortune to misery by an error in his own judgment. He states that “pity is occasioned by undeserved misfortune, and the fear by that of one like ourselves” (Hofstadter 109). The success of the tragedy lies in the poet’s ability to make the audience feel a combination of these emotions; pity for the misfortune of the character and fear that the events in the tragedy can occur in their own lives. Invoking these feelings in the audience is a significant task the poet must accomplish for the fulfillment of the tragedy’s underlying purpose.

Although it is necessary for the audience to participate emotionally, there must a separation between the audience and the tragedy itself. Aristotle explains that the tragedy must also allow the audience to participate in “catharsis,” or a release of emotions. This detachment of feelings is the final cause of the tragic work. It involves having both a sympathy for and a distance from the tragedy. Aristotle explains that a discovery, or a “change from ignorance to knowledge,” is necessary in order for catharsis to take place (Hofstadter 108). Once the audience understands the character’s error in judgment, they are able to learn from his mistakes. Invoking the emotions of pity and fear and then allowing for the removal of these emotions are important aspects the tragedy must accomplish, but the end of the tragedy lies in the tragedy’s instruction. The poet must show not only incidents and how they are logically connected throughout the work, but also how the audience can avoid making the same tragic mistakes in their own lives.

Like the tragic work, the sublime invokes a feeling of attraction. In “the Critique of Judgment,” Immanuel Kant explains that the feeling of the sublime is a pleasure produced by the “feelings of a momentary inhibition of the vital forces followed immediately by an outpouring of them that is all the stronger” (Kant 98). The sublime, however, is simultaneously “contrapurposive for our power of judgment” and “violent to our imagination” (Kant 99). Kant describes the sublime as what is “absolutely large” and explains that its magnitude cannot be estimated by means of mathematical concepts (Kant 103). The sublime does not conform to any objective principles or forms and rarely occurs outside of nature. Kant also explains that the ideas of the sublime are aroused through chaotic situations where nature displays its devastation and might.

Kant discusses two ways for an individual to make an estimation of a magnitude. A mathematical estimation of a magnitude is accomplished by means of numerical concepts. An aesthetic estimation, on the other hand, is accomplished through intuition (Kant 107). Unlike the mathematical estimation of magnitude, Kant states that aesthetic “judgment” struggles to provide a measure that can be used to estimate a certain magnitude. Kant explains that aesthetic estimations can not always be made because the imagination is insufficient for comprehending a given object in a whole of intuition. The imagination “proves its own limits and inadequacy” by attempting to comprehend the magnitude of the sublime (Kant 114). Kant further explains that the sublime produces a feeling of displeasure the arises from the imagination’s inadequacy. At the same time, however, there is a pleasure that arises from the limits of the imagination because it is in agreement with rational ideas and the laws of reason. In addition to arousing these emotions, the sublime makes us realize our “physical impotence” while at the same time giving us the “ability to judge ourselves independent of nature” (Kant 121).

In the article Schopenhauer and the Sublime Pleasure of Tragedy, Dylan Trigg discusses the relationship between the tragedy and the sublime. Trigg defines the sublime as “the inability of the mind or the senses to grasp an object in its entirety” and explains that the sublime “leads to an affirmation of an experience that contains in itself a sense of both awe and terror” (Trigg 165). Trigg explains that Schopenhauer’s concept of the sublime involves the inability of the senses to understand the magnitude of a certain object. Schopenhauer explains that the sublime involves a “violent tearing away from the relations of the same object to the will which are recognized as unfavorable” (Trigg 172). Schopenhauer explains that tragedy elevates consciousness over the will to the point of opposition against the will. He believes that the tragic effect eliminates an individual’s ability to see the will as one’s own. Tragedy brings individuals into a state that allows them to view the general will or what Schopenhauer calls the “will-of-the-world” (Trigg 174). Individuality is negated in acceptance of the tragedy, which leads to a spiritual elevation similar to the pleasure invoked by the tragic effect. Schopenhauer further states that “tragedy mirrors a death of the subjective self from which an objective and sublime self is born” (Trigg 173).

Although Schopenhauer draws connections between tragedy and the sublime, Trigg questions their similarity. Trigg explains that individuals must believe that their own will is in no immediate danger for them to experience a feeling of sublimity. Because tragedy encourages an individual to have a strong emotional response to the tragic effect, Trigg states that the sublime must be excluded from a tragic work. The sublime must be a kind of “distant proximity” (Trigg 175). According to Kant’s concept of the sublime, the feeling of the sublime can only be aroused by a specific group of objects. Kant states that, because an individual must make an aesthetic judgment when estimating a magnitude, the sublime cannot be found in products of art because their form and magnitude are determined by human purpose. Kant further states that the sublime must be found in “crude” nature, rather than in natural things with a determinate purpose (Kant 109). Because a specific purpose underlies the creation of a tragic work, the lack of purpose associated with the sublime creates an even larger separation between the two concepts. Schopenhauer presents strong correlations between tragedy and the sublime. The distance necessary for an individual to experience the sublime, however, directly contrasts with the close proximity of the audience needed to experience a tragic work.

Works Cited

Hofstader, Albert and Richard Kuhns. “Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected

Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger.” New York: Modern Library, 1964.

Kant, Immanuel. “Critique of Judgment: Including the First Introduction.” Indianapolis:

Hackett Company, 1987.

Trigg, Dylan. Schopenhauer and the Sublime Pleasure of Tragedy. Project Muse. Johns

Hopkins University, 2004. Web. 22 Nov. 2009.

Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and Apollonian Illusion

2009-12-02T16:28:00.000-08:00

I suppose I have the ignominy of the last posting–

My current interest lies in the way that Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872) picks up on the autonomy of the artwork that we discussed in re Kant’s Critique of Judgement. The BoT is a multivalent work that seems to respond to Kant in many ways (which is perhaps not a particularly surprising thing to say about any philosopher from C18 onwards), not least of all in its conception of the figure of the artist and its relation to the Kantian genius. What I hope to sketch an outline of in this post, however, is Nietzsche’s claim that “existence and the world seem justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon,” a move that recovers art from a potential Kantian separation from experience and places it as the very foundation of all human life (141).

Much of the BoT serves as an explication of two human drives drawn from Hellenistic culture, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. These concepts defy the kind of cursory treatment I’m about to give them, but it might be helpful to think of the Dionysian as essentially a kind of mental state in which man receives wisdom regarding the reality of existence (a horrible reality, you’ll no doubt be delighted to hear), the knowledge that what is best for man is “not to be born, not to be, to be nothing,” or, failing that, “to die soon” (42). The Dionysian dithyramb, taken to its extreme as an orgiastic ritual of mass intoxication and the dissolution of the individual into a kind of seething primal unity, is indicative of this state. It finds its opposition in the Apollonian, the drive towards (to continue to speak rather generally) the active creation of beautiful illusions, a tendency represented in the plastic arts. These two tendencies can never be separated; even as they resist one another (with the Dionysian revealing true existential emptiness and the Apollonian ceaselessly fighting to conceal this truth) they fortify and strengthen each other – the horror of reality dictates a constant effort towards beautiful artistic illusion, with this self-conscious illusion only being tolerated for its artificiality because of the knowledge of that which lies beyond it. The artwork is not to be believed in any unqualified manner but becomes a powerful medium through which “the truth is symbolized” and its appearance is “decidedly not enjoyed as appearance but as a symbol, a sign for the truth”; the beautiful artwork, which (to quote Moses Mendelssohn) must “illude us aesthetically,” must be understood both as an aesthetic (in the etymological sense of aisthesis) experience but with the simultaneous knowledge that something lies beyond it (qtd. in Bennett 422).

What Nietzsche seems to be working towards here is quite illustratively opposed, I think, to some of what we discussed in Kant’s third critique. What I have in mind is the experience of the sublime, that “attunement” of the intellect that is primarily self-reflective; as the sublime “proves that the mind has a power surpassing any standard of sense,” it speaks not to the object beheld but to the powers of the beholding subject (25.250). Any attempt to understand such an experience in terms of the sensible is utterly confounded, but in the process “the subject’s own inability uncovers in him the consciousness of an unlimited ability which is also his” (27.259). Where the contrapurposiveness of the object exceeds imaginative comprehension, the inadequacy of this faculty speaks to the existence of a higher one and establishes the ultimate purposiveness of reason. It is this kind of self-affirmative and self-revelatory experience that leads the subject into the realm of the supersensible, which is in turn indicative of his capacity for “moral feeling” (29.265).

For Nietzsche, the problem with this withdrawal from the sensible to the supersensible, this exaltation of an “unlimited ability,” is its very unlimitedness. This move leads to the uninhibitedly Dionysian; in the “rapture” of the “annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits” of experience, the Dionysian man finds himself in the position of Hamlet, the individual who has “looked truly into the essence of things” and thereby finds a “nausea” that inhibits action (60-1). In abandoning the comfort of the Apollonian that gives existence a “glittering reflection in the gods or in an immortal beyond,” man instead “sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of existence” (60). If man takes the illusion of art as only a means for establishing the existence of “higher” faculties, he loses the will to live; the conscious and alluring artificiality of art must serve as the “completement and consummation of existence, seducing one to a continuation of life” (43). Dionysian wisdom must be tempered by the Apollonian “middle world of art,” which may not conquer truth but at least renders it “veiled and withdrawn from sight” (42).

The experience of the artwork, then, must be central to human life, for it is “the eternal and original artistic power that first calls the whole world of phenomena into existence” (143). The experience of artistic illusion is part of the active process of “creating and of illuding ourselves (Apollonianly) with a world in which human life is possible; otherwise we simply could not exist” (Bennett 429). I recognize that this may come off as a rather bold and unfounded statement to make in the context of this very brief writeup and with my still limited understanding of both Nietzsche and Kant, but I do think that the essential concepts at work here at the very least engage provocatively with a tendency towards the mistrust and rejection of artistic illusion that we have traced in various ways throughout the entire semester.

Works Cited:

Bennett, Benjamin. “Nietzsche’s Idea of Myth: The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics.” PMLA 94.3 (1979): 420-433.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “The Birth of Tragedy.” Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Modern Library, 2000. 1-144.

The non-factual as truth in photography

2009-12-02T10:20:00.000-08:00

Following up last year’s regulation of runway models’ weight, Valerie Boyer, of President Nicolas Sarkozy's UMP party, proposed legislation last September for disclaimers on retouched photographs in print ads, billboards, and even political campaign posters. The legislation proposed does not ban or limit retouching, airbrushing, Photoshop or any photo-manipulation-- it simply asks that where these methods are applied, they are accompanied with a label stating to what extent the photograph is altered. Boyer wants one label, aimed at fashion photography, to read in bold: “Retouched photograph aimed at changing a person's physical appearance".

Her interest is in protecting the naive-- she reasons: “these photos can lead people to believe in a reality that does not actually exist, and have a detrimental effect on adolescents. " To Boyer’s mind, it falls to governmental regulation “to advise the public on whether what they are seeing is real or not." (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/6214168/French-MPs-want-health-warnings-on-airbrushed-photographs.html)

Many fashion figureheads the US and Europe have spoken out against this law, most speaking on either the freedom to Photoshop or in defense of the elusive feminine ideal the fashion world is accused of purporting. But neither of these objections really speaks to the proposed legislation, since both retouching and its produced ‘ideal’ are not being banned or restricted in scope-- the same kinds of magazine covers may proliferate, they only need to declare themselves altered. So what is harmed or destroyed in labeling these images, if it’s not the craft or retouching or popular ideal?

The label on the magazine cover would indirectly but effectively destroy both the status of the retoucher and the perpetuated ideal because the illusion of the image-as-photograph would dissolve. Suddenly the magazine image is subverted into a Thomas Kinkade piece-- transparently generic, with no reference to or evocation of reality. The pictured woman is no longer striking as a woman, only as a work. And as a work, she is benign-- no one would attempt to live up to painted image. It’s only when the picture has purchase on reality does it inspire imitation. When the consumer believes the cover model to be as perfect as pictured, she hasn’t found an ideal, but a precedent. This status of beauty she now knows is humanly possible, and the model is proof. She doesn’t discount potential retouching, and its potential presence doesn’t impugn the virtue of the image, since the final product is built off the model. Though there might be a little illusion, the majority of the image is true, representing a real person.

This encapsulates the tension inherent in the encounter with the modern photograph-- the simultaneous and contradictory convictions that what is pictured is not factual while what is pictured is still truthful. Looking at a magazine cover, we can posit that the image has been retouched (though, if it’s done well, it will be hard to know where), and this thought does not need to impede our enjoyment of the image. The images are made to be beautiful, not to be court evidence. In this situation we can accept ‘better is better’. As for images for court or dating sites, we’d say ‘truthful is better’. But even in magazine spreads designed first to be beautiful, the medium of photography is enough to suggest an underlying truthfulness. Even if the beautiful image is not factual, we want it to be truthful, not all artifice.

Could it be instead that the imitation of the image through retouching points out the truth behind the image? Perhaps if the picture doesn’t say something factually true of the model, it might, as an imitation of the female form, reveal something true about a female ideal. Instead of vaulting models to some status of human perfection, airbrushing instead insists that no one can attain such a status, and the composite Photoshopped image is modern proof that art (through human agency) is necessary for beauty.

Gadamer, in his section on ‘Art & Imitation’ articulates this theory, applying it to both art and language (though it largely addresses meaning itself). He writes:

“Recognition as cognition of the true occurs through an act of identification on which we do not differentiate between the representation and the represented...for what imitation reveals is precisely the real essence of the thing” (G 99).

This idea hinges on the natural selection in the process of recognizing the essential and necessary characteristics of a thing-- when these are discerned and imitated, the re-presentation is, in a way, a truer, clearer picture of the original because all the external nonessentials are stripped away. For a pithy example: call to mind the iconic image of Marilyn Monroe standing on those blasting subway vents for a promotional poster for ‘The Seven Year Itch’. It’s already a familiar image. But what is startling about this image (making indeed an icon), is how effectively it’s recalled in the simplest imitation. All anyone needs to conjure this image is a short, platinum blonde wig and a white halter dress. If a baby gorilla were dressed in this, it would still evoke Marilyn Monroe in that poster. Of course, the imitations can vary in how convincing or exact they are-- pearls, heels, the drawn-on mole would all add to the life-likeness of the imitation. But what is inviolable is the necessity and ultimate sufficiency of simply the wig and dress to recall the target image of Marilyn.

Gadamer would appreciate the divide between Marilyn and the baby gorilla-- the imitation should not replicate so perfectly that it becomes its referent. No one dressing up in this costume expects to be mistaken for Marilyn herself. The imitator is supposed to be recognizable as something that is not the referent and at the same time embodies the necessary qualities of the referent in the imitation. In a way, the gorilla participates more in ‘Marilynness’ than Marilyn does. Marilyn herself, as a person, contains unnecessary features extraneous to the image essential to the ‘Seven Year Itch’ poster-- the shape of her ears, the exact size of her feet, even her height are all properties of the person that are nonessential to the iconic image. And when a person (or gorilla) imitates this image, they precisely do that-- they don’t actually conjure Marilyn.

This imitation unites the familiar with the foreign. In the same way, the retouched cover model as an image performs the same kind of imitation of itself as an ideal. As it channels some social female ideal, it is not identical to the referent (which is actually an ineffable idea), but it channels and re-presents all the necessary features of it. The model herself, the skeletal structure on which the Photoshopper will build, belongs to a certain homogenous pool who are only privileged by their proximity to an ideal. One model imitating another would necessitate some human original to be channeled. Instead, the photographer and retoucher in fashioning an image are imitating the beautiful ideal by discerning and applying the necessary, impossible characteristics. Only after the retoucher has applied his tools to the image does it channel an ideal. A Polaroid of a model is disappointingly pedestrian. A magazine image of the same model is superhuman, effacing and embellishing the human beyond its own limits. This is the definition of ‘ideal’.

In a way, photographs are the last frontier of images-as-truth. While we admit some photographs can be manipulated, we still think that at its core the photo must reveal something factual. It is this tension that labeling would destroy. It would disallow the hopeful ambiguity of the viewer about what is real and what is art-- the illusion makes the image beautiful. We know it participates in truth and art, and we are unconcerned with the Real or factual. Labeling would only draw attention to the alterations as artifice, giving no heed to the necessity of the illusion.

To Benjamin, the retouched fashion photograph could be the united work of the painter and the photographer where the painter is the Photoshopper. Benjamin contrasts the operations of the two as such: “the painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, whereas the cinematographer [or photographer] penetrates deeply into its tissue”. Where the photographer can only show a piece or part of an object, the painter’s is “a total image”, coherent and sufficient to itself (35). The retouched photo could also unite authenticity with technological reproducibility, always at odds (according to Benjamin) since reproduction dilutes the experience of the work as having a unique existence in a particular place (21). Although the image does not belong to a particular physical place, the genre of retouching has borne a new realm of existence for the image-- one of hybrid artistry and technological capture. In this inverted concept of authenticity, the focus is not on an original (because there is no original referent). Instead of mitigating that the original is somewhere, it emphasizes that the original is nowhere. The image belongs to a new unique realm that defies physical location. The inspiration for the image belongs to a realm of ideas; the image requires the imitation of the idea be revealing, truthful unto itself.

Photoshop reminds us that we human beings are not our own artworks-- we participate in a potentially beautiful form, and we trust our artists to discern what features are necessary to make us impossibly but perfectly beautiful. We want to entrust ourselves to artists, not machines. Traditionally and always, artists have rendered more beautiful images.

Ranking the Aesthetic Realm

2009-12-01T04:38:00.000-08:00

While a majority of the readings we have encountered this semester deal with the difficulty of justifying aesthetics values, Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard offers another perspective of what he defines as the aesthetic realm in relation to the ethical and religious realms. His distinctions explain for the abundance of and attraction to the visual arts, and why it leaves us ultimately begging for more. I believe that his assertions help articulate how one participates in the aesthetic realm, but how it fundamentally is linked to anxiety, which is a fairly relatable experience.
In a move reminiscent of Plato, Søren Kierkegaard does not place a large stake in aesthetics. His conception of the aesthetic realm focuses solely on pleasure and the escape from the boredom of a monotonous existence. Kierkegaard calls boredom the “root of all evil. Strange that boredom…should have such power to set in motion” (8). The boredom has the ability to repulse the individual into action, which he would attribute for the abundance of artworks that we have discussed in class. The need to escape from boredom permeates the individual’s existence, and the participation in the sensually pleasing only reinforces how motivating boredom can be. One needs to look no further than the large body of visual representation in order to prove the extent of humans to escape boredom. The most heinous product of the aesthetical realm stems from the glory placed on possibility instead of actuality. This possibility arises when an artist speculates what to draw on the blank canvas or even in the interpretation of a completed artwork. The attention that possibility receives in relation to actuality infuriates Kierkegaard, because it would lead to anxiety.
The anxiety that Kierkegaard highlights differs from the medical sense; here anxiety deals with “freedom’s possibility” (30). The possibilities constitute an educative role in the individual’s existence, as possibilities inform the individual about his own notions of infinitude. The infinitude helps to educate one to the reality beyond the lowly aesthetic realm, only when it coupled with faith. Faith, without invoking a strong religious influence, regards the certainty that anticipates infinity (31). Anxiety of the limitless possibilities, which serve as an escape from boredom, can only be thwarted when the individual applies a faith of an infinity that transcends the finite. The challenge of man therefore is to cope, through faith, with the seemingly limitless extent of human freedom. We see the artist as fundamentally trapped in this freedom when approaching the blank canvas, as the possibilities of creation are endless. This causes anxiety, which Kierkegaard would believe the artist to leave unresolved, primarily because they are participating solely at a sensuous level concerned with finitude. Kierkegaard’s discussion of the anxiety appear similar to the Kantian sublime, which would allow for its appeal to emotion, but ultimately doesn’t correspond because of the role of the God and the value of realms Kierkegaard’s system.
Throughout his works Kierkegaard is critical of the aesthetic realm and how it differs from the ethical and religious realms. He explores the ethical realm in his analysis Isaac’s near sacrifice in the Bible (I offer a brief summary: Abraham is called upon by God to sacrifice his son Isaac, and Abraham agrees. As he is going to slay his child, God intervenes and ultimately rewards Abraham’s faith in God despite the unethical request that he was initially burdened with). The ethical realm dictates how the individual interacts with other individuals in a universal manner (15). The solely product and end of the ethical realm is to foster universality, in which individuals can harmoniously exist without infringing upon another. The ethical realm does not necessary oppose the aesthetic realm, as they coexist but are both ultimately subordinate to what he coins as the religious realm. The religious realm, like the aesthetic realm, relies on a temporary departure from the ethical realm in order to engage the subjects within the realm appropriately. For the aesthetic realm this would constitute art creation or interpretation, because it brings the individual closer to possibilities grounded in finitude and ultimately can be explained as an escape from boredom. Kierkegaard values the religious realm over all others, because it can transcend what is merely universal, and moves us closer to the possibilities involved with infinitude (To continue the relationship with the Isaac story: Abraham transcends the ethical realm by complying to sacrifice his son and is rewarded by God, which is infinite and transcends the ethical realm. This is why we regard Abraham as a hero and not a murderer, because he had faith in something infinite outside the ethical realm and successfully learned from anxiety). If we recall, these are the possibilities that he deems the most educative.
The gripping aspect of Kierkegaard’s works is his firm belief of a higher participation that in a merely aesthetic realm, which I tend to agree with. I side that one of the appeals of the aesthetics stems for its function as an escape from the boredom of the ethical realm. As the utilitarian will agree, the natural inclination of man is to pursue pleasure, thus reinforcing why the aesthetical realm’s large body of visual representations that indulge the senses. The struggle for me throughout this semester has been in the prioritization of aesthetics among the other aspects of life. I find Kierkegaard’s work refreshing, yet questionable at the same time. While it seems intuitive to me that aesthetics, or things dealing purely with sensation are below morality (ethical realm) or some type of religious realm (here I will just assert an infinitude and not favor Christianity), Kierkegaard own personal motives may cloud his judgments. His justification for faith and anxiety stem from a need, specifically his own, to participate with God in a manner that transcends the universal, and participates with infinity. This would almost inherently discredit the aesthetic realm, as it deals with finitude and it is incapable of applying faith to anything beyond itself. The downplaying of the aesthetical realm coincides with my own thoughts, but I am weary of an appeal to religion because of its seemingly tenuous position in relation to rational thought. Therefore, I take these readings with a grain of salt, but ultimately agree in the system set forth by Kierkegaard, as it accurately reflects the nature of anxiety in terms that relate to visual artistic representation and the aesthetic realm and why it is possibly inferior to an educative anxiety born out of a faith in an infinite.

Works Cited
Kierkegaard, Soren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Existentialism. Comp. Robert C. Solomon. Second ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2005. 17-23. Print.
Kierkegaard, Soren. Either/Or. Existentialism. Comp. Robert C. Solomon. Second ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2005. 8-14. Print.
Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Until Death. Existentialism. Comp. Robert C. Solomon. Second ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2005. 15-17. Print.
Kierkegaard, Soren. "The Concept of Anxiety." Existentialism. Ed. Robert C. Solomon. Second ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2005. 29-31. Print.

Pictures for My Presentation

2009-12-01T04:18:00.003-08:00

I couldn't figure out how to make it work with both pictures and words so here are my pictures. These are the images I refer to in my presentation. I thought they were really cool and never really thought about something like graffiti as actual art before this class.

Art in Urban Spaces: Can It Really Be Censored?

2009-12-01T04:18:00.001-08:00

I was driving to Texas for Thanksgiving and I saw a billboard that struck me. It said, “Billboards are the art gallery of the public.” I thought that it was interesting that someone took the time to make a billboard that displayed this message to the general public. I began to wonder about this billboard after I pulled my phone out and quickly wrote down the message. I first wondered how many people a day passed by it? Of these people, how many actually read what it had to say and thought about the message? It didn’t advertise anything like a restaurant or casino. It was simply just a message. This message stuck with me through much of the break. You see, I am not very familiar with much art in the world. I regret this but it is not my main interest to discover more and more art. I am interested, however, in urban space and the way this space is used. Professor Grady helped me to combine this interest with the artistic world. There I found urban art or street art. The point of the billboard story, however, ignited my thoughts about other public, urban art. I began to wonder how a place like the one Socrates describes in The Republic would go about censoring art that is done out in the public. I thought it would be interesting to look at the oldest philosophy we studied and one of the newest forms of art available today.

Street art can be defined as, any art developed in public spaces and can range from graffiti to a poster on the side of a pole. There are limitless possibilities of what can be defined as street art. This type of art is usually not something that the government approves. Graffiti, for example, is illegal in many places and therefore must be created very secretly. Most of the graffiti seen around Memphis is the result of vagrants and not artists but some of the works seen in other places are done by an artist. The artist, therefore risks getting arrested each time he/she attempts to create a new work of art. The world literally becomes the artist’s canvas in street art. This is very important because the streets are open to the public.

There is one artist, in particular, that I will be concentrating on in this presentation whom I was very unfamiliar with until recently. Banksy is a well-known, British graffiti artist who uses the public as his canvas and gallery. Born in 1974, Banksy developed into an artist who used his canvas to convey his message to the world. He uses any public space in cities to display his masterpieces. He goes unseen, however. And has never been seen by the public eye which makes his existence as an artist very peculiar. Banksy can basically create whatever he wants, wherever he wants, as long as he does not get caught.

As you all remember from the beginning of the semester, Socrates spends a good deal of time discussing censorship of artwork in The Republic. He believes that in order for children to develop properly they should be exposed to the right forms of imitation. He speaks primarily of written imitation but I wonder what Socrates would say about visual artwork. First, do the same censorship rules apply? I think they do because children imitate what they see and what they hear. As a visual learner myself, I understand the importance of visual learning. Consider if I were to see a painting of a murderer who was not convicted of the crime and released, I may, hypothetically, think that I would be able to get away with a crime as severe as murder. If this painting was censored and I was not allowed to see it then I would never develop this thought. This is one of the reasons Socrates believes in censorship.

The book Wall and Piece opens with a statement from Banksy. In this statement he says a number of shocking statements including, “some people become cops because they want to make the world a better place. Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place.” (Wall and Piece, 8) I think this is important especially when looking at the opinion of someone like Socrates who wants to have a censorship on the arts. Banksy is a completely uncensored artist. He can literally put on the wall whichever he pleases. How do you censor an artist that you can never see? I kind of think of it as censoring a ghost, which would be impossible to do and therefore would be difficult to deal with in this kind of society as demonstrated in The Republic. There are some examples I would like to look at as potential bad influences on young eyes as identified by Socrates. I think I really like Banksy simply because he breaks the rules. He could never be censored, which is extraordinary.

There is also a portrait of a guard using the restroom on a wall. ThisThe girl hugging the bomb is a good example also known as Brighton 2003 of mimesis. Next to her image in the book, Wall and Piece, is the text, “it takes a lot of guts to stand up anonymously in a western democracy and call for things no-one else believes in – like peace and justice and freedom.”This is very important in his work. I think this image can be considered an image that could be bad for young, developing eyes to see. Clearly, the young girl is embracing the bomb. I know that this is very satirical but how is it supposed to be received by young eyes would be unacceptable in The Republic. If imitation is the best teacher of children then this image could be very detrimental to the development of the kids. It could be viewed as acceptable public behavior to behave like or imitate the guard.This painting makes public indecency okay because an official is engaging in it. I would love to know what Socrates would think of an image like this. I think that Banksy does not intend for his images to be taken so literally but I think it would still be interesting.

Then there are the rats, which is what I am calling Banksy’s many depictions of rats. The caption next to the first rat that appears in the book reads, “they exist without permission. They are hated, hunted, and persecuted. They live in quiet desperation amongst the filth. And yet they are capable of bringing entire civilizations to their knees. If you are dirty, insignificant and unlived then rats are the ultimate role model.” I know this quote is not very relevant in the idea of mimesis as inspirational to developing youth but I do think that Banksy is right about the rat as the perfect role model for the dirty and insignificant. By seeing rats appearing in these positions children could potentially believe that this kind of life style is desirable when most people believe it is not.

I think Banksy is very interesting because his style challenges art, as I am familiar with it. I would be very interested to know how a philosopher like Socrates would receive someone who is completely uncensored like Banksy. Would he regard his work as important or just obsess over trying to censor him? I thought this was very interesting and am still deciding how I think Socrates would react. Is urban space the perfect place for an artist like Banksy to work? I really can’t see him being well received in any other setting.

Works Cited:

Philosophies of Art and Beauty. Ed. Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns. University ofChicago Press: Chicago, 1964.

All background information on Banksy found on Wikipedia.

Banksy, . Wall and Pieces. 10. London: Century, 2005. Print. (I wasn’t really sure how to cite this because most of the pages did not have numbers on them)

A discussion of moral art

2009-11-30T23:00:00.000-08:00

John Gardener begins his essay, “On Moral Fiction”, with the metaphor of Thor and his weapon (hammer, axe, or whatever it might be) Mjollnir, warding off the forces of chaos and entropy. Gardner compares art and criticism to Thor’s hammer. Thor is the artist and art is the force that the artist wields to affirm life, to establish virtue, and to discover, generation by generation, what it means to be human. The rest of the essay is Gardner’s ruminations on this subject, on the purpose behind art.

On page 18, he defines moral art, saying, “television—or any other more or less artistic medium—is good (as opposed to pernicious or vacuous) only when it has a clear positive moral effect, presenting valid models for imitation, eternal verities worth keeping in mind, and a benevolent vision of the possible which can inspire and incite human beings toward virtue, toward life affirmation as opposed to destruction or indifference” (pg. 18). This notion, as indicated by the title of his work, consistently appears throughout his book. While such a view could easily lead to the purpose of art being to teach, Gardener makes a firm distinction between didacticism and true art. True art doesn’t “teach” morality. It is by its nature moral. It doesn’t force upon the reader, but instead explores, with much concern, such morality, acting as a mode of thought. By creating a fictional imitation we better understand that which we imitate (116). By creating situations in which characters choose between acting morally and immorally, we are forced to consider such choices and are encouraged to make them ourselves.

Gardener goes on to comment on Plato and Aristotle’s treatment of the poet (the creator of fiction), saying, “To Plato it seemed that if a poet showed a good man performing a bad act, the poet’s effect was corruption of the audience’s morals. Aristotle agreed with Plato’s notion that some things are moral and others not; agreed, too, that art should be moral; and went on to correct Plato’s error. It’s the total effect of an action that’s moral or immoral, Aristotle pointed out. In other words, it’s the energeia—the actualization of the potential which exists in character and situation—that gives us the poet’s fix on good and evil; that is, dramatically demonstrates the moral laws, and the possibility of tragic waste, in the universe” (pg. 23). Rather than asserting, as Plato does, that a fictionalized account of wrong action leads to imitation, Gardener agrees with Aristotle in thinking that the poet’s actualization of character imparts to the audience his moral stance. This in turn leads to our moral education—we are forced to consider whether his characters are models for imitation or not.

However, he speaks about this idealist view of art as unfashionable in contemporary intellectual culture. Words like “Truth”, “Beauty”, and “Goodness” are no longer spoken of. They are seen as embarrassing. He bemoans the fact that ideas like “morality” have gone out of fashion in favor of “The Other” of philosophers like Sartre, the ubermensche of Nieztsche, or the Stranger of Camus. Such philosophers would deny that the verities that Gardener speaks of exist, especially in the immutable fashion that Gardener believes. Gardener discusses Sartre in more detail, exploring the French philosopher’s rejection of a number of sources of morality (values as implications of our conscious nature, values as implications of God, and values as implications of rationality), instead opting for nausea and angst.

He quotes Tolstoy in asserting that ideals expressed in art can affect the way people act, at least some of the times, in some people. Once again, Gardener makes a distinction between the morality rising from religious ideals and morality from a different source. He explains Tolstoy’s conception of art as given by a divine source. Morality, as prescribed by God, is enacted by the “hero”, Jesus. The artists (the recorders of Biblical events) record the events of the hero, which leads to a changing of the way people act. Similarly, Gardener uses the example of Achilles in the Illiad to demonstrate the progression of morality. Achilles, the demigod, demonstrates to normal humans what values the gods see as admirable and worthy.

However, Gardener critiques the current state of art, which he claims has increasingly replaced the affirmation of life with destruction. Instead of art being the force working against chaos, immoral art affirms Ragnarok, encouraging the exchange of humanity for the inhumane, encouraging the exchanging of death for life. It is this disconnecting from “the real”, from there being a concrete signified behind the signifier that is today’s prevailing intellectual fashion. Without such a “real” the artist is forced to ponder endlessly the questions of relativism into a sort of paralysis (51).

From here, Gardner moves to the critics. Once again, he bemoans the critics who have bought into the cultural fad of distinguishing between the modern and the postmodern, the structuralist and the post-structuralist, the conventional and the innovative. Instead of creating such categories, Gardener prescribes judging art for its morality. In true art, devotion to exploring morality is the standard by which critics should judge.

One of the most convincing examples Gardener uses to illustrate this immoral art is the music of John Cage. A number of musicians, each given a card with a number of musical motifs, play their parts at the tempo or dynamic level of their choosing, whenever they want. Or maybe the conductor signals to a section to play at a certain time. To Gardener, this is immoral art despite the fact that it supposedly “expresses the relativity and chance of a post-Newtonian understanding of the universe” or something like that. The musicians hate playing such pieces and audiences hate listening to them. Such music is immoral because chance has nothing to do with right action. If a person started randomly throwing pieces of bread out an airplane, would you credit him for feeding the hungry when a homeless person happens to find bread lying on the ground? It is the exchange of texture for “the real” that Gardener rejects in fiction, music, television, and all forms of art.

For Gardener, “True art, by specific technical means now commonly forgotten, clarifies life, establishes models of human action, casts nets towards the future, carefully judges our right and wrong directions, celebrates and mourns” (100). Rather than ranting or giggling at the absurdity of our predicament, true art prays or creates weapons for us to use. It is the lightning strike, illuminating our surrounds for a split second, giving us a moment of clarity in the darkness (100). Art explores what it means to be human, which is inextricably tied with being moral.

In discussing this moral art, Gardener covers a number of the authors we have during the semester. He cites Plato and Aristotle as establishing the purpose and usefulness of art. Like Kant, he espouses a disinterested view of art. However, it seems that he decides art has the definite purpose of affirming life. This seems to contradict the Kantian view of purposiveness without purpose. Like Kant, it seems Gardener sees art has having the power to give the feeling necessary to act morally despite the urgings of our instinct. Like Thor’s hammer, true art is directed towards the destruction of that which is immoral. It condemns Norman Mailer, who speaks of Charles Manson as “intellectually courageous” (77), instead depicting him as evil and destructive. It is constantly fighting for the good, passing down the wisdom of our predecessors to a new audience. It re-examines and makes relevant the archetypal stories, repackaging them for future generations.

C.S. Lewis and a Theodicy of Beauty

2009-11-30T22:11:00.000-08:00

In his article “Evil and the Cosmic Dance” for the compilation C.S. Lewis as Philosopher (edited by Baggett, Habermas, and Walls), Philip Tallon largely critiques a previous work by John Hick in which aesthetic considerations are deliberately ignored in favor of moral and ethical ones as Hick attempts to construct a theodicy of soul-making. Hick argues that we must emphasize the relational aspect of God and that His chief aim in creating humans was to have fellowship with them. As such, questions of beauty (a type of non-moral goodness), which largely fall into the God-as-Creator category of emphasis, must needs be deemphasized in favor of explicit moral goodness in order to properly engage with the God-as-Lover-of-Humans category.

Tallon, however, sees a synthesis of the two in the work of C.S. Lewis. While many theodicists, Tallon argues, use religiously neutral values and purely moral considerations in formulating their work, this can lead to an overly distant and austere God, as well as one whose goodness is too alien to understand. By considering the beautiful in nature and in the world, a more robust picture of God’s goodness can be painted.

There is a section in Tallon’s article that articulated Augustine’s theodicy, namely, that the universe is like a painting “which, though it has some black patches, is still beautiful because of the purpose these dark spots serve, to heighten the brightness of the light patches by contrast. In the Augustinian picture, then, punishment and plenitude keep the universe beautifully balanced and wonderfully diverse” (Tallon 197). However, this serves more to critique and engage with Hick’s work than to set forth anything based on Lewis, and I will not spend any more time on it here.

Tallon begins by quoting a passage from Lewis’ essay “De Futilitate,” which I encourage everyone to read. In it, Lewis writes about human interaction with reality:

We must, then, grant logic to the reality; we must, if we are to have any moral standards, grant to it moral standards too. And there is really no reason why we should not do the same about standards of beauty. There is no reason why our reaction to a beautiful landscape should not be the response, however humanly blurred and partial, to something that is really there.

Lewis, then, sees beauty as an objective property. If we are correct in assuming that we can parallel his argument from Miracles that morality is grounded in God, then we can also say that beauty has its source in the Divine. And if beauty is from God, it is worthwhile to study it. As Tallon writes, “Following Lewis here, even if we cannot precisely see where beauty fits into theodicy, we can pursue its study in the confidence that we are advancing our knowledge of God’s goodness. For any philosopher to restrict theodicy’s scope to the purely moral may be marked by a sort of distrust in the deep connections between beauty and goodness” (Tallon 200).

Tallon focuses on two main areas of Lewis’ thought in order to make his argument: eschatology and soul-making. For those not familiar with the terms, eschatology means the study of last things, such as the end of the world or the final situation of humanity. Soul-making is a process by which God develops humans into beings more like Himself. This process sometimes can involve pain and suffering, in order to bring about a higher good.

Lewis argues that “any theodicy ignoring Heaven cannot even be called Christian” (Tallon 200). The pleasures and goods of this eternity infinitely outweigh any finite suffering endured on earth. Therefore, in a cost-benefit analysis of pains and pleasures, the good always outweighs the bad for the Christian.

Tallon analyzes the tendency which we have as fallen humans to insufficiently imagine Heaven as a fitting reward for present pains. If we do not see Heaven as desirable, our theodicy suffers. Lewis, says Tallon, does an admirable job of describing Heaven in such a way that one can make a feeble guess as to what the Christian will encounter there.

The soul-making aspect of this theodicy of course states that God uses pains and struggles to shape people into more perfect beings, beings more like Himself. “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world,” says Lewis. We cannot ignore pains, so God sometimes uses them to teach essential lessons.

Tallon points out that while Hick’s emphasis on moral development through pain is right and biblical, his somewhat exclusive emphasis upon it is not as good. Tallon writes:

Defending God’s goodness solely in moral terms can lead to a picture of God that is cold, harsh, and generally not worth defending. What Lewis does so successfully, in including beauty and pain as formative parts of God’s creation . . . is not only to balance the joys and pains of God’s world but also to suggest that pain itself, in its ability to break through our self-centeredness, is thereby helping us to enjoy divine and created beauty (Tallon 205).

Lewis upholds Augustine’s view that virtue is the ordinate condition of affections. We can love things appropriately and inappropriately. Thus a proper instruction in valuing things, including beautiful things, is an aspect of the soul-making process. “If appreciation of creation is part of our development in virtue itself, then, contra Hick, upholding the aesthetic qualities of creation is fully compatible with a person-focused theodicy” (Tallon 206).

I will end with another quote from Lewis, his most famous regarding beauty and the human relationship to it.

We do not merely want to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it . . . When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch (Lewis, “Weight of Glory” pg. 17)

Works Cited
Tallon, Philip. "Evil and the Cosmic Dance." C.S. Lewis as Philosopher: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Ed. David Bagget, Gary R. Habermas, Jerry L. Walls. Illinois: IVP Academic, 2008. Print.

2009-11-30T22:01:00.001-08:00

In Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” he examines the effect that new technologies, especially those of photography and filmography, have affected the way that we relate to visual arts, such as painting, as well as examine the new forms of art created with these film technologies. While he mentions music occasionally, he is most definitely preoccupied with the visual arts. While photography and film were exploding in popularity, the technology for recording audio and distributing music were also making great strides and permeating society at the same time. While the audio technology really took hold a bit later than the case with photography, the things he brings up in relation to the visual arts have interesting parallels in the world of music.

First, Benjamin brings up the fact that the work of art has always been reproducible by more rudimentary means. Music is a peculiar form of art in that by its very nature it must be reproduced every single time that one experiences it. Before recording technology came about, music needed musicians to perform the music, and because it had to be recreated in each instance, it simultaneously could never be reproduced exactly the same, while each reproduction was, in a way, an authoritative instance of the music with no “original” to be compared to. With the introduction of recording technology, the live performance is imperfectly reproduced no matter how good the technology is. This recording however can be reproduced perfectly any number of times and can then be transported anywhere.

As music recordings spread, this causes a shift in the way people think about music in that the reproduction of the live performance becomes the primary production in music. People begin to focus on recording music and listening to recorded music than performing or listening to performances. This is evidenced by the fact that nearly all music we encounter today is recorded and electronically reproduced. The recording of the music then becomes the authoritative artifact of the music. At this point, it is important to define exactly what music is. Is it in the creation of sound waves traveling about in space at a particular time? Is it in the score (when available)? Is it in your perception of the sound? If you think of a piece, but no sound is made at all, is it music? If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, is it music? While I am being slightly facetious with the last question, I bring this up only to demonstrate the difficulty of defining exactly what music is, other than a blanket term for aural art, and is complicated further with the introduction of recording technology. Is the music in the grooves of the record, or the magnetic tape, in the code of the CD, or computer audio file?

Benjamin points out an extremely important effect of recording, “technological reproduction can place the copy of the original in situations which the original itself cannot attain.” One can listen to any work, no matter what it was originally intended for, basically anywhere, anytime. This has a peculiar effect on music that was written before this technology. Whether a piece was written for a religious ceremony or a performance in a concert hall, one can listen to it in the privacy of their home, or basically anywhere with portable music players. A somewhat funny manifestation of this is a line of CDs put out by the Naxos Record Label, “Chill with ______” where one can put on a CD and chill their choice of Satie, Bach, Chopin, Handel, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Schubert, Rachmaninov, Ravel, Mozart, Beethoven, or Vivaldi.

The more important repercussion of this technology is the music that results from this technology. Benjamin brings up is that in the advent of photography and reproducibility, art reacted with the doctrine of “l’art pour l’art…which rejects not only any social function but any definition in terms of a representational content.” As Benjamin points out, technological reproducibility emancipates the work of art from its “parasitic subservience to ritual.” Music begins to be composed with no intention of it being performed live at any point.

A group of composers emerged that utilized the more widespread availability of the magnetic tape to create their musical compositions working with the tape itself. An early example of this is Pierre Schaeffer, who coined the term Musique concrete for his compositions written around 1950 arranging recordings of machines, running water, thunder, footsteps, breathing, and other environmental sources, and recording it onto a single tape, creating a permanent musical artifact. (Pierre Schaeffer – Etude Aux Chemins De Fer: http://www.mediafire.com/?ld5j1mmmtzm). People like John Cage created compositions splicing together pieces of tape of all kinds of sounds (John Cage - Williams Mix: http://www.mediafire.com/?2u3ndjnnyjj), and Steve Reich created his earliest phase pieces by playing two tapes of the same content simultaneously at slightly different speeds, then recording that to a tape (Steve Reich - It's Gonna Rain Part 1: http://www.mediafire.com/?nok1mizkt1h). The effect of these early pieces is seen in music all the time today, including any music that uses sampling or sound clips. A recent example that comes to mind is the music of the books, which mixes “found sound” in the same vein as Schaeffer, with acoustic music, with a lot of other studio manipulation. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wVhWcpZpac)

The effect of technological reproduction on music composition is much more fundamental. Benjamin seemingly prophetically says, “to an ever-increasing degree, the work reproduced becomes the reproduction of a work designed for reproducibility.” Nearly all music today is designed to be reproduced, best exemplified by the mere existence of Pop music. In many cases in popular music today is written in the studio, and the performance of the music is most often an attempt to recreate what was created on the recording. The recording becomes the “original” from which the performance attempts to reproduce.

New forms of art, like the elevation of photography and filmography to art, were also created within music (music being the blanket term for aural art). The studio engineer as artist emerges from this technology. The famous producer, Brian Eno likened his work with music to painting, saying: “You’re working directly with sound, and there’s no transmission loss between you and the sound- you handle it. It puts the composer in the identical position of the painter- he’s working directly with a material, working directly onto a substance, and he always retains the options to chop and change, to paint a bit out, add a piece, etc.” The immense transformation of music by its ability to be technologically reproduced parallels that of the transformation of visual arts by photography as described by Walter Benjamin. Many of the things that he predicted in his essay, which came true for the visual arts, also manifest themselves in the aural arts.

Santayana's take on Aesthetics

2009-11-30T21:47:00.000-08:00

George Santayana is a pragmatist from the 20th century, he offers a very different explanation for our conception of aesthetics, and taste than our previous authors. He argues that aesthetic value is subjective and created through experience. The different social structures and cultures a person lives with affect their judgment of artwork. When contrasting Santayana’s philosophy with Kant’s, there is a clear distinction between the two aesthetic philosophies.
He explains that we recognize and learn things based on “how they look and what they do to us” (Santayana Animal Faith 104). This would mean that as animals our experiences shape our attitude about the way certain objects appear to us. For example one person that had a dog growing up might see a painting of a dog to be cute and pretty; however, another person who was attacked by a dog at an earlier time might find the same painting of a dog to be terrifying. Santayana claims that every time we experience something our brain stores everything we sensed and learns from it. Like in the example, the person who was attacked by the dog at a young age is afraid of the dog because of his past experience with one. His animal self tells him that he needs to beware of dogs. His judgment about that artwork in the present stems from lessons in the past about what is good or bad for his well being. Another example would be food poisoning. If you ever get food poisoning from a restaurant like Chipotle, even after you recover, the thought of that food makes you sick. Your body associates the food at Chipotle with all the sick feelings you experienced. Your body forms a taste to help with its betterment. Likewise the things that we find beautiful are things that our animal selves find to be beneficial almost according to the lessons it learned. These experiences form our later judgments. Life experiences are not shared by everyone. Because of this, there are no universal standards of beauty. “No two men have exactly the same faculties, nor can things have for any two exactly the same value” (Santayana 42). Therefore the aesthetic values of art works are subjective, and can change over time with experience.
This idea of subjectivity with art seems very similar to Hume’s idea of “taste”. That different people can hold different values for the same work of art. Hume says that there is no point in arguing taste no one will win the argument. Santayana is able to give an account of why people have different tastes, and why it is futile to argue about the value an artwork. People may have different experiences, some may be similar, like they all had to go to school as a child, however there are many experiences that are unique to individual people. These experiences cause people to form judgments on the things they see according to those experiences. The only way to cause someone to agree completely with your assessment of a painting is to somehow change their life so they had all the same experiences you had. Some people might agree about the value of certain artworks; however that might stem from the fact that they might have had similar experiences in the past.
The idea that experience molds our value of objects around us also helps to explain why our ideas of what qualifies as good art has changed over the years. The social structures and the way society functions as a whole have changed over the years as well. It seems every time society has changed art has changed as well. Benjamin had noted how technology has drastically changed the world of art. Santayana believes artworks in general are symbolizations of the environment and social structures, meaning works of art are merely a reflection of society. This depicts the reason why art has changed throughout the years, and is different throughout cultures. People in a society have many similar tastes in works of art because they have many of the same experiences living the same society.
The greatest contrast to Santayana beliefs on making aesthetic judgments would be the Immanuel Kant. Kant claims that a person has to be disinterested in the object in order to make a value judgment. One has to be disinterested in their contemplation of the thing. He says that a judgment of beauty comes from disinterestedness, while things like the agreeable come from bodily desires or interest. For example Kant would say that when you look at a glass of water when you are thirsty, the sensation you feel is the agreeable. Your desire for water has caused this sensation to feel good when you see water. Your self interest caused those feelings. The utility the glass of water would serve caused those feelings, not your disinterested contemplation of it. You were not disinterested enough to make a judgment of aesthetic value. If you were not thirsty and disinterested with the existence of the water than you would be qualified to form an unbiased opinion of it’s aesthetic value, you would probably discover the glass of water does not have aesthetic value. Kant demands that people abandon every preconceived bias and experience when viewing art.
Santayana offers a very different view of how we should value aesthetics. He claims that “beauty is a pleasure regarded as the quality of the thing” or pleasure that comes from the quality and value of an object (Santayana 49). He explicitly disagrees with Kant’s concept of disinterestedness. Santayana claims that it is impossible to perceive a new object without applying past experiences. Kant believes that a person can, and should, abandon everything they learned from their society and culture when they view an object. Santayana claims that we do not do this. He says that our admiration of art comes from our past experiences and the effect perceiving those objects has on us. To give art any kind of value, we have to apply our personal judgment which comes from our experience in life. Back to the example of the portrait of the dog people make different values because of the experiences they had in their lives. Santayana says that the standards of art are subjective and cannot be conceived without bias, nor can it be conceived merely through the intuition.
Some people might argue that Santayana’s definition of the beautiful is the same as Kant’s concept of the agreeable. That Santayana’s idea of beauty is merely something that creates pleasure. Santayana makes a clear distinction between the pleasures resulting from the perception of the object and the idea of the agreeable that Kant mentions. “Most of the pleasure which objects cause are easily distinguished and separated from the perception of the object: the object has to be applied to a particular organ, like the palate, or swallowed like wine or used or operated on in some way before the pleasure arises” (Santayana 48). With normal pleasures the feelings of pleasure we receive come from the effects those things have on our body. Not from merely perceiving the quality of the object we see. Santayana says that the value of beauty is an intellectual pleasure that comes from perceiving something that is good according to the judgment formed by past experiences. He says that “beauty is a value… it is an emotion, an affection of our volitional and appreciative nature” (Santayana 49). He says that the pleasure gained from beauty “must not be in the consequence of the utility of the object” (Santayana 49). Santayana says that the pleasure gained from beauty does not satisfy some pleasure of our body; however it satisfies some fundamental desire or need from our minds. Therefore a person cannot make the claim that Kant’s idea of agreeableness and Santayana’s idea of beauty are the same thing. Kant’s idea of the agreeable is that of an object that has a utility or purpose that it fulfills for our body; which differs from Santayana’s conception of beauty, which is that beauty is something that fulfills the desires of our mind.
Santayana argued for evolving standards of art. He argued that the value of an artwork a person has stems from their past experiences. When contrasting this idea with Kant’s philosophy of aesthetics, there is a clear distinction between the two philosophies.
Works Cited
1. Santayana, George. The Sense of Beauty. 2. Chicago: Charles Schribners Sons, 1896 . Print.
2. Santayana, George. Skepticism and Animal Faith. 3. New York: Dover Publications, 1955. Print.

"this is water! this is water!"

2009-11-30T20:15:00.000-08:00

For no real rhyme or reason, I’ve always enjoyed reading commencement addresses.[1] In a timely fashion for all of us graduating in December, David Foster Wallace[2] offered a gem of a speech whose life advice parallels the hermeneutical foundations developed by Heidegger and Gadamer.

For those unfamiliar, reading DWF can be a marathon task. Case in point, his novel Infinite Jest clocks in at a hefty 1079 pages – and 388 endnotes (with some individual entries as long as eight pages, complete with its own set of sub-footnotes). It’s safe to say that DWF expects the reader to be fully engaged in his artwork. As he describes the blurring of the writer/reader relationship in an interview, “this process is a relationship between the writer’s consciousness and her own, and that in order for it to be anything like a real full human relationship, she’s going to have to put in her share of the linguistic work” (McCaffery 137-8). No “passive spectation”[3] allowed!

DWF’s address to the Class of 2005 from Kenyon College[4] seems to diverge from his traditional manner. His pithy, simplistic advice was not reductionist as one would be left to assume from his lack of verbal footnotes, but rather a genuine and warm address from a guy whose been there himself. Structurally, he leads off with a “standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories” (Wallace 1).

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’”

DWF wants to convey to the Class of 2005 that such a parable, such Aristotelian mimesis, is less insulting than the traditional liberal arts cliché would lead on, “because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about” (Wallace 1).

DWF rightly describes the difficulty of the defaulted human condition (“Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of”) and stresses the importance of individuals who can adjust such a natural default (“often described as being “well-adjusted, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term”). Without such radical adjustment, the banal days of the impending adult life will be lonely, as we would then stay as “lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation” (Wallace 5).

This speech, this work of art, saved through the magic of a mass-emailed transcript-turned book published in 2009, invites the same engaging work from the listener as of the reader of DWF’s other works. His postmodern challenge for the individual to de-center their subjective self is “unimaginably hard to do” (Wallace 5), but certainly possible. To hermeneutically think outside the “excellent servant but terrible master” (Wallace 2) frees the individual, so that it will “actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down” (Wallace 3).

The capital-T Truth for DWF is simple: about life before death. About freedom involving “attention, awareness and discipline, and being able to truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day” (Wallace 5). About the real value of education, “which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight around us, all the time that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: ‘This is water. This is water’” (Wallace 5).

Works Cited

Larry McCaffery, “An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” in Review of Contemporary Fiction 13 (1993).

David Foster Wallace, Transcription of 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address, May 21, 2005.

[1] In the summer months, C-SPAN helps one indulge such an interest on their program American Perspectives.

[2] the “King of Footnotes”

[3] See David Foster Wallace, E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction

[4] “Not near Uganda”

Benjamin and the Third Reich

2009-11-30T19:53:00.000-08:00

July 18, 1937 marked the opening day of the “House of German Art,” a neo-classical styled grandiose stone temple, and the “Great German Art Exhibition” that boasted 16,000 works (Adam 94). On the following day, the Nazi party began an annual tradition of exhibiting more than 5,000 pieces of “degenerate” art, which was attended by more than 2 million German citizens (Petropoulos 57).

When I first learned about this obsession with art in the Nazi regime, my first thought was, “That’s so weird, why would the Nazis care so much about determining “good” and “bad” art? Does it really matter that much how someone paints or sculpts something?” Why did the Nazi Regime value artwork so highly? I believe that part of the answer lies with Benjamin. The author warned that without the politicization of aesthetics in an era of the technological reproduction of art, that society would unknowingly leave itself vulnerable to the devastating forces of fascism. Unfortunately, Germany did not heed this warning, and was awesomely manipulated by the fascism of the Third Reich. With the help of Germany’s ignorance of the separation of art from its unique existence and tradition, the Nazis were able to create their own tradition of art. The Nazis were able to "reorganize" the people's perception of what constituted "real German art," and what did not.

In “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” Benjamin claims that, when art is technologically reproduced many times over, the unique existence of the artwork – “the here and now of the original [image]” (21) – turns into a mass existence. When this happens, the work of art no longer belongs to a specific time and place, and is severed from its unique existence (and also from its tradition, which is founded upon the work’s unique existence). This detachment of the tradition from an artwork is particularly problematic given that human perception is "organized" by tradition and history - the tradition of the work of art conditions an individual how to interpret the respective piece. Therefore, when the tradition is utterly disconnected from the work of art (which is an unavoidable consequence of mass technological reproduction), an individual's perception of an artwork is unfounded, and thus easily manipulated if left unchecked and unnoticed.

In order to combat this ignorance of the detachment of art from its unique tradition, the society must politicize its aesthetics. This is exactly what Expressionism sought to do. After the end of the World War I, Germany lay in economic and social ruin: the great expectations that Germany had for the war (as the solution to their economic and political problems) proved disastrously false. Many Expressionist artists came back from the front lines forever changed: the darkness of war had changed the artists’ perceptions of art, humanity, German society, and themselves. The artists expressed onto the canvas their disillusionment of war, self-doubt, existential ponderings and insecurities, and distrust of absolutes. The art that was produced at this time shows the politicization that infused these artists’ works.

(For the following images, I've tried to limit my comments, so that you can interpret the paintings as independently as possible)

"The War" Otto Dix, 1920
(Shows the mechanization of war and the fragmentation that is created. Also, note the hostile and violent images)

"After the War" Will Küpper, 1919
(The figure's eyes are disproportionately large, and his long fingers seem to mesh into his skeletal figure)

Left: “Self-portrait in Florence” Max Beckman, 1907
(Well-lit, more “realistic-looking” portrayal of him as a confident, complacent young man)

Right: “Self-portrait in Tuxedo” Max Beckman, 1927
(The figure is positioned beside total darkness, which literally cuts him in half. The figure seems more closed-off and dark)

Benjamin also argues that with technological reproduction, the cult value of an artwork (namely, the expression of the artwork in the context of its tradition) decreases, while its exhibition value increases. In this way, technological reproduction frees art from its "subservience to ritual". In photography and film (arguably the best examples of technological reproduction of art in the modern era), exhibition value drives back the cult value of the artwork in almost every respect. Nevertheless, the cult value of the artwork is not easily erased in the minds of human beings (27). This "resistance" from the cult value of an artwork is seen in the way that we still believe that an image in a photo or film shows us something REAL, although this image should only have exhibitionary value attached to it.

Because of this misplaced cult value projected onto the artwork, the German masses could be manipulated into thinking that Hitler’s "reality" was more real than actual reality. In the year 1937 in Munich, the Nazis presented “Entartete Kunst” – a “degenerate art” exhibition where thousands of Expressionist works of art were chaotically presented, unframed, clustered, and badly lit, next to captions that emphasized the “perverse Jewish spirit” supposedly captured in the paintings. On average, 20,000 people a day came to see the “Degenerate Art” exhibit (Petropoulos 57).

“You see about you the products of insanity, of impudence, of ineptitude, and of decadence.” (Grosshans 105)

--Adolf Ziegler (chief organizer of the “Entartete Kunst” exhibition), in his opening address of the “Degenerate Art” exhibit.

According to Walter Benjamin, the apparatus of film and photograph is so intimately embedded in reality, that it seems to portray a "pure view of reality". However, this presentation of reality as equipment-free is possible only through editing, lights, camera positions, etc. In other words, this "equipment-free" reality is only possible through the "intensive interpenetration" of equipment (30). The “reality” of Hitler’s Germany was presented via deeply penetrating veils and manipulations. The lies that they identified as truth – such as their romanticism of war and the Grecian-styled and Impressionistic art that they claimed as “truly German” – did not have any unique existence within the historical and traditional context of the German nation, and thus were not rooted in reality. Nevertheless, the Nazis gained the authority to determine what was “reality” because although it only retained exhibitionary value, their aesthetic still retained cult value in the minds of the people.

Works Cited:

Adam, Peter. Art of the Third Reich. New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1992. Print.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version”. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Ed. Benjamin Walter Et Al. Cambridge, Massachusets: Harvard: 2008. 19-55. Print.

Grosshan, Henry. Hitler and the Artists. New York: Homes & Meier, 1983. Print.

Petropoulos, Jonathan. Art as Politics in the Third Reich. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Print.

Revisting Benjamin and Cinema: an interpretive update moving away from marxist conceptions of History & Tradition

2009-11-30T18:43:00.000-08:00

Because of our privileged historical vantage point almost 75 years after he published Benjamin published his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" in 1935, I believe we can offer some important interpretive corrections to Benjamin's arguments and characterizations of the significance of the introduction of mass cinema. Additionally, the resulting revisions of Benjamin's analysis encourage us to abandon Benjamin's Marxist conception of history and tradition, and instead adopt a characterization strikingly similar to Gadamer: where revolutionary artistic challenges to present understandings of the tradition are best explained through the re-conceiving and expanding pre-existing ideas and strands within the tradition itself.

In his essay, Benjamin argues that the introduction of sound in the movies was not an especially revolutionary development, saying sounds were more or less implied by the images on the screen. That might arguably be true for films like run-of-the-mill early actions, where it would be natural to associate the sound of an explosion with the action screen, or to subconsciously imagine the playing of a somber musical score when one of the good guys dies in a really old war movie. But, this kind of a characterization of images and sound seems a lot less accurate for things like opening scene of the Normandy beach invasion in Saving Private Ryan. In that scene the shaky camera work, quick cuts, desaturated images, visual effects, and the disorienting, deafening sound of the explosions all seamlessly blend in such a way so as to depict to the audience an unromanticized horrific vision of what it was like for American soldiers on those beaches during D-Day. Similarly, Benjamin's claim that moving pictures necessarily implied particular sounds feels forced when grappling with inventive uses of music. Examples that immediately come to mind are the director Quinton Tarantino's use of the song "Stuck in the Middle with You" during the infamous ear cutting scene from Reservoir Dogs, or director Stanley Kubrick's use of a classical music score throughout 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick's use of sound works to simultaneously deepen our understanding of the movie's space visuals and also detach us from them in such a way that we constantly contemplate the significance and meaning of what we are seeing on screen, instead of dealing merely with the visuals in an instrumental sort of way by simply saying "oh look, a bunch of stuff moving around in space going from here to" or even “so and so is piloting the ship in order to land on the moon."

Since I imagine a lot more people in the class haven’t seen 2001 than the other films I mentioned, here are some clips from the movie. Watch them at your leisure; they aren’t really a part of the presentation. I posted it mostly to encourage people the people who haven’t seen 2001 to give it a shot and also provide a tangible companion to the above paragraph.

Consequently, it seems that Benjamin underestimates the way movies utilize sound, rather than the mere facticity or superficial content of a particular sound usage so as to imbue the work of art, or at least our experience of it, with a kind of intentionality. After all, with a huge Hollywood budget, what movie maker couldn't buy the rights to a Leo Strauss song or put first-rate sound effects or special effects into a war movie? Significantly, to a large degree, we can account for the strikingly different ways films have employed sound over the years with the ideas of earlier thinkers, such as Kant's notion of purposiveness or Hegel's sensible presentation of a concept. Those traditional ideas may need some expanding and revision, but their basic explanatory foundation still seems up to the task of making sense of modern examples of sound in motion pictures as well as older ones.

Naturally, this makes me fairly skeptical of Benjamin's characterization of the introduction of mass cinema and photography as a kind of complete Marxist artistic revolution: a revolution where the quantitative proliferation of mass-reproduced copies of images altered those images qualitative content for the people viewing them in such a way so as to decay the aura of authenticity surrounding the image. While many of those points may remain valid, others seem dubious, like Benjamin's assertion that old concepts like "genius and creativity" have been totally "neutralized" and completely emptied out by the development of cinema so that they are unavoidably dangerous and in need of being discarded.1 To the contrary, with the benefit of historical hindsight, it does seem like the earlier examples I mentioned of sound in cinema, particularly some Tarantino and Kubrick films’ use of music, indicate that such concepts are still relevant. Thus, it seems more fitting to characterize the response to the unique challenges to existing historical conception of the artistic tradition put forward by photography and film, not as a dramatic sort of Marxian Revolution where the conditions capitalism unavoidably creates, namely the creation of the working class and thereby the proletariat, are the same ones that end up necessitating a complete revolution in the economic structure that brought them into being, but as one where historical variation can be accounted for through the expansion and preservation of existing strands within the historical artistic tradition. Still, Benjamin's fundamental analysis is sound. Our understanding and attitudes toward old concepts has to be different now from what it was back in the 1930s in order to avoid exploitation. Today we are much more cognizant than people in the 1930s likely were of how movies, such as the Triumph of the Will, can use aesthetics for political propaganda.

At this point, I'm going to backtrack a bit and mention one of the more immediate consequences of introducing talking and sound to movies that was enormously significant to the trajectory of movie production, namely the beginning of the musical film genre (think Westside Story, My Fair Lady, Singin' in the Rain, and even movies like The Wizard of Oz.) While the heyday of that genre definitely seems to have passed, recently we've experienced a resurgence in Hollywood making this kinds of films, as evidenced by movies like Chicago, Dreamgirls, and Moulin Rouge. I mention this, not only because it re-enforces some earlier points, but it also challenges Benjamin's characterization of the relationship between the stage and celluloid. While Benjamin is certainly correct to maintain that theater and film are two separate art forms, he seems to think that the gap between them, particularly for actors, is wholly unbridgeable. In fact, stage and film, while definitely separate art forms, have historically influenced one another a great deal. Most of the musicals on film were basically imported Broadway stage musicals, such as Oklahoma!, or Yankee Doodle Dandy (both of which were released well after Benjamin published his essay.)

Additionally, it’s worth mentioning that Benjamin was writing in an era where, in most films, actors functioned like automatons that were subservient to the producer and director's vision of the film and often acted out one dimensional roles. (To a lesser degree, we still can see this approach operating in more modern movies. Take, for example, Platoon, where director Oliver Stone forced his entire cast to go through 2 months of boot camp prior to filming in order to guarantee the movie performances that had an exhausted, weary quality, instead of an affective, polished quality that actors may unintentionally give off.2) One of the clearest examples of directorial approach to acting around the time Benjamin was writing is the 1915 silent film Birth of a Nation. In this clip, the actors hardly do any acting at all and the limited bit that is there is either laughable--such as, overstated gestures and movements--or painfully one dimensional, the heroic Klansmen riding in to save the day or the ravenous, rapist African-American male character played in black face. Watching a couple minutes at the start and then the last minute or so, ought to give one a pretty solid idea of what little even some of the better regarded silent films (AFI ranked Birth of a Nation #44 on its Greatest Movies List) have to offer in the way of non-caricatured characters that seem remotely authentic.

Still, I don't think he gives film sound acting is proper due, even at the time he is writing, mostly because of the emergence of more credible acting portrayals by rising acting stars like James Cagney. Look at this scene from the very influential 1931 mobster movie The Public Enemy.

Cagney, who was a stage actor himself, has palpably more naturalistic style compared to the two other actors in the scene--whose work really seems dated, wooden, and insincere/inauthentic by comparison. No more tilted gestures, long stares, over-enunciated diction, and the melodramatic stage mannerisms that were the hallmark most other early talking pictures and silent films. To audiences at the time, Cagney was himself, the real thing, or at least appeared that way. Since Public Enemy was a box office smash released in 1931, 4 years before Benjamin published his essay, it seems much more appropriate (and less presentist) to hold Benjamin’s feet to the fire for his frequently overstated, almost absolutist, claims about the nature of film acting than his views on sound and the movies or even the relationship between films and theater (since Hollywood did not really start cranking out tons of musicals until the late 30s-early 40s). Cagney, however, was the exception at the time and not the rule. He definitely helped raise the bar, so that god-awful acting (like the acting by the other people in that scene) was no longer acceptable in Hollywood, but one would be hard pressed to say that most of the performances, particularly those by some of era's top stars, such as Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, or Gary Cooper, would seem just as fresh, human, and fitting if the movie was made today.

Most critics would agree, historically, that is owed to the next revolution in screen acting, which occurred in the early 1950s due to emergence young stars, such as Marlon Brando and later James Dean, who famously practiced a style of acting referred to as "method" acting. Again, demonstrating the influential relationship between stage and film, "method acting", based on the writings of Russian theater director Stanley Stanislavsky, had its roots in the theater. Its greatest early film practitioner, Marlon Brando, similarly began his career in the theater and achieved Hollywood superstardom playing the role of Stanley Kowalski, which he had earlier played on the stage. Dean studied acting under Lee Strasberg, who also taught such famous actors as Al Pacino, Paul Newman, and Ellen Burstyn. Strasberg described his approach, particularly the technique of emotive memory, as follows, "the idea is you learn to use everything that happened in your life and you learn to use it in creating the character you're working on. You learn to dig into your unconscious and make use of every experience you ever had."3 However, one shouldn't overestimate the importance of this technique to all "method" acting schools. Other "method" teachers, such as Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro’s teacher Stella Adler typically downplayed this technique either as a starting point or a crutch. Adler once quipped to a student in one of her acting classes "your life isn't big enough to play King Lear" in order to show its limitations and underscore the need for other routes toward empathetically acting out a role.4Consequently, other method schools, such as Adler's and Stanford Meisner's, put a stronger emphasis on studying the text, researching the role, instant and inner justifications for actions, "being in the moment", and using one's imaginative capabilities to help create the character.5Because of these important historical developments in film acting since 1935, I think we can safely soften Benjamin's overly bold proclamation that "[because the camera is substituted for the audience in film] the aura surrounding the actor is dispelled—and with it, the aura of the figure he portrays," so that we understand these claims in a much less absolutist way.6

Works Cited
1. Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," [class handout], 20.

2 Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert, “Siskel & Ebert – Platoon (1986)” [video], Retrieved 29 November 2009, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFPj1Rd0rYE

3 Mel Gussow, "Lee Strasberg of Actors Studio Is Dead," New York Times, February 18, 1982, D20.

4 Stella Adler, The Art of Acting, edited by Howard Kissel,(New York, NY: Applause Books, 2000), 83.

5 Adler, 162-163, 125-127, 64

6. Benjamin, 31.

On the Soul's Favoring the Painting above the Photograph: A Nod to Aristotle

2009-11-30T16:56:00.000-08:00

****The questions of philosophy are not approached by most. Look to your average person walking along the street to explain a single of the great question posed by philosophers and you will most likely be left wanting. Fewer still have a strong desire to look backward far enough to meditate on the work of one of philosophy’s founders, Aristotle. Why are beautiful things appreciated? Clearly our innermost humanity, or soul for the purposes of this discussion, is responsible for our imaginations and interpretations of images. Aristotle sums up this idea by stating in his treatise On Memory and Recollection; “We have already dealt with imagination in the treatise On the Soul. It is impossible even to think without a mental picture. The same affection is involved in thinking as in drawing a diagram”. In this way Aristotle ties all creative ability to some mental creation dependent upon imagination which he in turn connects to our ability to think. This leads to a discussion relating to how we create these images. Over the course of modern human history there is only one means of preserving images that has remained relatively constant. The ability of a human to see an object, a person, or a place and then recall that image in their minds is common to most. As technology has advanced the ability of humans to recreate pieces of time has increased as well. Whether we have used pottery, paintings, or photos we have sought the ability to capture the images our eyes receive and then transfer them to some physical reality. Clearly both photos and man-made art are appreciated today, but the hand drawn representation and the painting are able to compete against the perfect photo. Something within us assigns a value to the hand-made creation despite the fact that more accurate representations of reality can be found among photos.

*****I submit that the photograph takes all of the fun and excitement out of the creation of a permanent image of reality. That mysterious process whereby the soul transforms a perception into a memory or a recollection and then the body strives to reproduce that image is reduced to a few mechanical parts put together to form a seemingly magical box that is capable of instant replication of any scene. This is a very efficient solution, but it destroys the magic inherent in human creation. Now let us turn from the abstract to a concrete example of the current topic of discussion. Consider the following portraits side by side for a moment.

****The image to the upper left is a portrait by Van Gogh titled Old Peasant. The second is a photo of an actual elderly Peasant man. Notice that the image on the left ignores the negative aspects of reality. The man has a walking stick, but it does not appear to effect him. He appears dressed in good looking clothes and any negative hygiene issues are hidden by a closed mouth. In contrast the image on the right, a photograph, embraces the edginess of reality evidenced by the teeth missing and the unkempt appearance. Despite his carefree smile, the viewer is able to see that reality has not been kind to the man. His life is displayed in clear unadulterated truth, while the painted peasant is able to hide his truth behind fluid brush strokes and the deception of imagination.

****The reason that the existence of two images with such strong similarities and stark contrasts is possible is because humans are forced to use memory in creating physical images of reality that they have previously perceived. Aristotle proposes in his third book from On the Soul provides a context in which we can come to grips with the differences present in these two images: “Sensation is either potential or actual, eg., either sight or seeing, but imagination occurs when neither of these is present, as when objects are seen in dreams”. When Van Gogh stopped looking at this peasant man, if there was in fact a single person that gave rise to this portrait, he could only rely on imagination to recreate the image on the canvas. In mixing both reality and imaginary the artist creates something that the camera can never capture because the camera cannot ignore reality and insert its hopes, dreams and desires into the image. On the other hand the camera for this reason stands above prejudice. Recall to your minds for a moment the occurrence of viewing a picture that was taken to close to its subject. Can anyone truly say that such a picture accurately reflects the world around it? Clearly such a photo does represent what was before the camera when the button was pushed, but it does not represent what you or I would imagine the object to look like if we were asked to ponder the idea for a moment. In contrast the use of paint or pen to recreate an image is a fulfillment of the soul’s natural inclination to fully remember something that it has seen at some moment in the past.

****Take a moment to imagine for a moment some place or person from your past. Consider their clothing, eye color, hair color, height and size. Ready? Likely what you have created is not a truly representative image. Instead you have produced a mental composition of all your previous perceptions of that person or place. In addition you have likely included your own personal sentiments about the object you attempted to recall. We simply cannot separate our souls from the process of memory and recollection. It is the same for you and me as it has been for every great artist, and every terrible artist for that matter, throughout history. As we examine images we desire to understand the motivation of the soul in creating them and what, if any, this effect has on the paintings and photographs.

The man at right is supposed to be Vincent Van Gogh painting. Notice that the room appears to be bare behind him, and that the colors do not perfectly represent reality as our eyes perceive reality. His style included swirls of paint that our eyes do not observe. How are Van Gogh, and others like him, able to create images that do not accurately portray reality? Aristotle concluded many years ago that “perception of proper objects is always true, and is a characteristic all living creatures, but it is possible to think falsely, and thought belongs to no animal which has not reasoning power”. In On the Soul, Aristotle claims that Imagination is something that is common only to humans, the animals with the ability to reason. It is our ability to see reality and then make thoughts about it that gives imagination power and feeds our ability to create images that are not perfect and yet send a message to the audience. Having considered Van Gogh's self-portrait consider the photgraph to the left. The man is seen in clear straight lines with a simple background behind him. He holds his brush very realistically and appears to have only recently completed his painting. Further the face lacks the humanity that I can sense coming from the face of Van Gogh’s portrait. Somehow his painted eyes cry out with humanity more so than do those of the man painting above. The very nature of instant replication jeopardizes its status as a proper representation to begin with because it lacks the prejudices present in the minds of all those who have ever witnessed a person or a landscape. This is both the best and the worst aspect of the camera. In capturing an image without taking into account context the camera loses the depth that paintings and other handcrafted works of art possess. The artisan does not simply recreate the image of a man or a mountain. The image becomes a representation of both the object’s soul as understood by the artist and the artist’s soul as well. All the experiences of the artist combine to provide us with more than a simple retelling of something that any person could perceive. Instead what we find is a retelling that is filled with judgments and memories and imperfections that lead to a new level of understanding for all involved.

****The above painting, by Van Gogh, and this photo mark the final comparison that I will draw here in this presentation. Between these two images I found distinct similarities in that both depict trees in the foreground, mountains further back, and wisps of cloud in the sky above. As I’m sure anyone can tell the differences are clear the painting is green and verdant while the photo is of a desert landscape. These two artists have also gone different routes to create similar images. The camera captured the image perfectly, while the painter’s hand sought to convey the image in sweeping strokes and whirls of color. The landscape appears more foreign than does the landscape of Mal Brey. I genuinely pose the question which work do you prefer and why? I find myself drawn into the dreamlike quality of the painting above because it almost seems to dare me to claim that the image isn’t real. It seems to call to life the swirling madness of the world. The way in which the wind pulls and tugs in various directions represents all the different directions we are being called to move toward in life. Maybe it’s a weakness of mine as a lover of literary interpretation, but I favor any creation that offers me the chance to peer within it and question its purpose. With a photo I too readily assume that it’s sole purpose it to perfectly represent some image out there in reality. The questioning of a work is what grants it its true value.

*****In discussing the differences between the photo and the portrait/landscape in light of Aristotle’s discussion on the soul and memory I hope that we have all grown in our understandings of things philosophical and things artistic. The idea that the camera can replace the brush is absurd because the brush holds infinite possibility. The brush has the enables humans to acknowledge the original perception and then to deviate from it. The camera must show whatever it perceives in its lens, and for this reason it will never truly surpass the art of handmade images, or at least that is my claim. The idea of creativity and imagination are too central to the identity of humanity to be cast aside by some technological revolution that claims it does things better. I have had opportunity in my own life to compare the pros and cons of the portrayal of reality by camera and the portrayal achieved by hand drawing an image. I conclude with an example in my own life where I have found the ability of a person to recreate an image by hand to be just as valuable, truthfully more so, than the ability of a piece of plastic to recreate the same scene.

Schopenhauer's Sublime and Night of the Living Dead!

2009-11-30T16:40:00.000-08:00

For Schopenhauer, the sense of the sublime is attained by the aesthetic contemplation of an object that is inherently hostile to one’s will (or to human will in general). While the beautiful can be enjoyed in terms of perceptive knowledge without even the consideration of one’s will, the sublime requires a struggle of the subject to separate oneself from the concerns of the will. The subject recognizes the threat to the will but consciously ignores the relation of the object to the will. By detaching oneself from the desires of the will, the subject is able to achieve a level of aesthetic contemplation of an object that normally appears terrible to the will. This includes anything in which the will could feel a threat (and sensory pleasure could be obtained), from a desolate desert to a raging storm. This state of aesthetic contemplation is described as a “quiet comprehension,” which doesn't sound wholly unlike the state of a moviegoer in a theater!
The experience of viewing George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead(1968) evokes a sense of the sublime with its apocalyptic atmosphere and unadulterated gore. Of course, most people now can see this film and laugh at its dialogue and somewhat melodramatic acting, but at the time of its release, audience members were shocked. Schopenhauer would account for this in his explanation of a certain type of reaction to an overwhelming feeling of the sublime in which one realizes that the object exists only as our own idea.
The film’s story follows a handful of people trapped in a farmhouse during a zombie siege. Over the course of the night, all but one of the characters die, and the survivor is shot in the morning by a group of vigilantes who mistake him for a zombie. The use of handheld cameras and natural lighting makes the film seem almost like a documentary, and this combines with the ultimately tragic plot to create a general sense of despair. The sense of hopelessness evoked by these elements is exactly what Schopenhauer would describe as hostile to the will. The conflicted characters trapped in the house demonstrate the anxiety that the subject experiences when the hostility to the will becomes an actual threat to one’s well-being, but the film viewer is able to contemplate this sensory knowledge without worrying about the dangers of the zombie outbreak. The almost total collapse of society as we know it offers an overwhelming hostility to human will as a whole, and this is exactly the type of object of contemplation that would be able to induce a sense of the sublime.
Here is a clip that demonstrates the sublime (albeit with bad quality, no thanks to youtube) on a more specific level; close shots of zombies eating intestines! With the concept of the gore film hardly five years old (all praise Herschell Gordon Lewis for his creation of the splatter film! But that’s for a different paper…), audiences were blown away by such explicit shots. Watching someone get ripped open and have their insides eaten by humanoid-type monsters is obviously offensive to the will, but if one is able to separate oneself from the relation to the will, one is able to fully appreciate the sensory knowledge and achieve the sublime.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxME9TeoxyQ&feature=related

On the Art of Music: A Hegelian Approach

2009-11-30T12:06:00.001-08:00

In reading and talking in class about the various views on art that emerge, I found myself particularly drawn to Hegel. The idea of art as a projection of ideas and ordering with form sat well with me, but I also felt that his forms of art, particularly with music, were very intriguing. He posits that art is divided into three main categories: Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic. I decided to see if I could match his idea with various pieces of music I listened to, and in doing so, see if I found the system still strong enough to warrant acceptance.

One thing that struck me, however, was not only what type of music to play, but whether I should search instrument or vocal/instrument pieces. Since the music I would choose would be from the personal music I knew, I felt that finding vocal pieces would be fairly easy. But what would a Hegelian understanding of Instrumental music be? He himself seemed to ultimately dismiss instrumental music, saying rather oddly that it was “for the musical expert who can follow the inner, technical operations of the music in all its details,” while vocal music “relates to some tangible ‘topic’ through the inclusion of words. Julian Johnson believed that this statement comes out of the fact that Hegel himself is very Logocentric, or stuck in the Western tradition that prioritizes spoken word over written, and believes in some significant correlation between signifier and the significations. Because of this, extra emphasis is almost always placed on vocal works, and we can see why Hegel would have dismissed Instrumental music as lacking what vocal music had acquired.

But regardless of the fact that Hegel himself seemed to voice these concerns, do we have to take that explanation for granted? Could the system he has created, and the ideas incorporated into it, also help explain our acceptance of instrumental music if we separate ourselves from his obvious logocentrism? I attempted to find pieces of music that mattered to me (whether I liked them or simply found them interesting) and then to see if they fit a certain category and why. I believe that Hegel’s theory of art can certainly be used to explain the nuances of both vocal and instrumental music. For this I am going to show 6 different pieces of music. This included an instrumental and vocal piece for each of the three categories of art. After a brief explanation of the piece, click on the link to listen to the work. While some of the pieces may be rather long, you only need to listen to 30 seconds to a minute to get the fullness of my points.

Symbolic Music

If you remember, symbolic art, in a much reduced way, is when the vagueness of an idea attempts to placate itself onto nature, or in this case music, in such a way that it lifts up, exaggerates and distorts the original medium. We therefore have the Sphinx and other monstrosities that have nothing to show in themselves the idea we wanted to achieve. Possibly to put it in another light, I thought of our conversations about the perceived duality of the mind and body. Symbolic arts seems to be a way in which the old notion of the mind, i.e. that there is a form that predates the matter, or that the mind can exist without the body and is eternal, is portrayed by our art forms. Because of this violent grafting, while we may find a piece of music interesting, we ultimately do feel that it fails as a true work of art. Beyond our acceptance of “abstract and modern” music, we still feel that somehow what we are witnessing is a transgression against the medium.

German Expressionism: Mondestrunken (Moondrunk).
This is the intro piece to Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. It is trying to convey the drunkenness of the poet with the overall misery and derision of the entire work. This idea of drunkenness and absurdity is forced over the medium, here music and Sprechgesang, or speech-song. And yet, the grafting is so severe that the form is warped into a work that is atonal and wholly un-musical. It tries to directly express the idea and the emotion of the poet, but in the process destroys any form that the music could have taken.

http://www.ronsheim.org/Tape3Ex1.mp3

Schoenberg: “String Quartet No. 3” Op. 30 Mvt 1.
It is no surprise that an instrumental piece from Schoenberg, one of the most famous German Expressionist, is a prime example of symbolic music. This piece is a combination of string instruments that truly searches for an idea or meaning without finding either. While incredibly interesting it stops at that, and is ultimately empty.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8LXYm0QO1c

Classical

For Hegel, Classical art becomes the perfect unity of idea and form, notably the Greek sculpture, and has no distortion or placation. It is when the “gods are brought down to Earth” or when idea and form reach a perfect harmony of expression. Classical art seems to go along with the idea of supervenience. It is formed matter, in the sense that there is no one before the other, but they both interact to make the substance exactly what it is. When a neuron fires in the brain, it is accompanied by mental phenomenon as well; not because one exists separate or without the other, even though they can be looked at distinctly, but they exist as sides of the same coin. To say here that the form precedes the idea, or that the idea is in higher priority than the form would be to make a gross error. In terms of art, this is the perfect genre.

Mozart: Flight of the Bumble Bee
As the name suggests, it is a musical rendition of a Bumble Bee. Here, I think the idea and the form are in perfect unity. The orchestra is able to completely capture the fluttering of the wings and the movement-attention of the bee from flower to flower, as well as his surroundings. This piece, in other words, is complete and self-sustaining, not requiring more or alluding to anything else.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXCBlWIGJK0

Charlie Brown: Christmas Time Is Here
This piece, surprisingly, is an ideal form of Classical Music. Christmas comes in Winter, a time of bleakness, monochrominity, and yet there is still a glimmer of hope of new life hidden inside dead trees and buried caves. And thus, while the voices of the children and the piano are certainly bleak, there is still a glimmer of hope or expectation inside the work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ3aAfTUEBs&feature=PlayList&p=7BD4F5B56A163DEE&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=47

Romantic

Finally there is Romantic music. Romantic music does not commit the error that Symbolic does. Instead, it simply shows that the medium of art and specifically music is not enough to express the fullness of the idea. Rather than try to force itself onto the medium, it presents as much as it can, but the listener can feel the alluding to something more, and incompleteness is born. Hegel believes that it is this movement that leads us to Religion and Philosophy. I believe these next two works showcase this very well. Romantic Art for me seemed a type of property dualism. Not that they are separable, and it isn’t some form of hierarchy where one tries to retain dominance of the other. Instead, the formed matter retains another element to it that isn’t simply what has created it. Similar to what you said yesterday about A.I., Floyd is a representation of Formed Matter. And yet, if I simply took the idea of him and what has made him and put it together, it wouldn’t truly be wholly him. That’s why I use the odd phrase, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

John Coltrane: Acknowledgement, A Love Supreme
Here, John Coltrane tries to reach beyond Jazz music to come to a greater source of “truth” as he calls it. And yet it is very different from an atonal, “free jazz” scenario, or what we saw in Mondestrunken. Here, he uses music to showcase his idea, and yet alludes to something beyond it. Coltrane himself believed he was searching for the fullness of his experience, a religion, and this is felt in the piece without a distorting of the medium at work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=558bTG0D-xg

Mahler Resurrection Symphony:
Here, Mahler shows the moment of awakening of the sleeping saints. The English translation of the development section is:
Rise again, yes, rise again,
Will you My dust,
After a brief rest!
Immortal life! Immortal life
Will He who called you, give you.

The idea of the dead sluggishly rising is presented here, a lumbering from a rest, slowly and surely rising, but when it reaches the moment of “after a brief rest”, the form is left: The idea here is greater than the music and voices can quite match. And yet, the form is not warped or broken with the attempt. There is no grafting of the idea and a lifting of the music. And yet, something isn’t quite captured, and gives the alluding to something beyond, something that is also carried with the idea. This is an amazing representation of Romantic Art.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GlLfNvJKjI&feature=PlayList&p=FEDCF06E21E60F70&index=7

While Julian Johnson is right in saying that Hegel himself was too dismissive of instrumental music as fitting into his categories, I found that his system itself seemed to do quite well in categorizing it. All that is required is a stepping away from his Logocentric view, to understand, as Gadamer would say, that instrumental music can speak to us and express ideas as well. If we say it is no longer simply in the realm of spoken language, then it opens up much more music, and ultimately art, to Hegel’s categories and understanding why the arts matter so much to us. I look forward to reading what you guys think about my examples or the ideas expressed here.

JOHNSON, JULIAN, Music in Hegel's "Aesthetics": A Re-evaluation , British Journal of
Aesthetics, 31:2 (1991:Apr.) p.152

Wittgenstein and Ordinary Language Aesthetics

2009-11-30T08:38:00.000-08:00

Ludwig Wittgenstein was an Austrian born philosopher who spent the majority of his studies and teaching career at Cambridge University. One of the earliest proponents of what is now called “Analytic Philosophy”, he wrote two major books in his lifetime, The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), and Philosophical Investigations (published after his death in 1953).

In the Tractatus, he sought to organize language formally, using principles derived from Bertrand Russell’s new developments in predicate logic. Upon the completion of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein believed that he had solved all of the problems of Philosophy.

All that the Tractatus has to say about Aesthetics can be summed up in it’s famous last proposition, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” If anything carried over to Wittgenstein’s later work in Aesthetics, it is this.

In 1929, after nearly 10 years of retirement, Wittgenstein realized that he had not, in fact, “solved” philosophy, and returned to Cambridge to teach and begin his language work again. During this period, he came to realize that his attempts to formalize language were absurd. Language already had a rule system – that system given it by its speakers. It makes no sense to take a word (lets use “to be”) and assign it a new, formalized meaning apart from its daily use (as most western Philosophers had redefined "to be" to fit their metaphysics). The mere fact that a word is used by English speakers every day tells us that it has a set meaning of a sort which makes it intelligible to all fluent English speakers. From this point on, Wittgenstein advocated what he called “Ordinary Language Philosophy”, which is the concentrated study of language as it is used in daily life. From this, comes his 1938 “Lectures on Aesthetics”.

“Lectures” is the best window into Wittgenstein’s Aesthetic theory that we have. He never explicitly wrote on the topic of Aesthetics, though it was of particular significance to him in his day to day life. “Lectures” is in fact a compilation of his students’ notes on the summer of '38 lectures, which allow us to gain some insight into what was said in the classroom at Cambridge, along with his replies to student objections.

Wittgenstein begins by asking the question he always asked, “How do we talk about aesthetics and aesthetic judgments?” The sentences we usually use go something like this – “The tree is beautiful”. Clearly, beautiful is being used as an adjective; it would then seem that beautiful is some quality that the tree possesses. That, Wittgenstein explains, is clearly incorrect. “Beautiful” is not something about the tree the way “green” is. It has more to do with our reaction than the object itself or some will bestowed upon the object by it’s creator. In this regard, he stood in direct opposition to many of his early twentieth century counterparts (e.g.: most of Heidegger’s major works had been released in the 15 years prior to Wittgenstein’s lectures, and Wittgenstein himself was very much conscious of and involved in, though not in agreement with the Bauhaus school of design and early “International Style” of architecture).

Wittgenstein contends that, in assuming that “beautiful” is being used as a property descriptor, we are, in effect, trying to hammer a nail in with a screwdriver. Beautiful is not actually used as a descriptor at all, but rather as an interjection -- a completely different tool in our linguistic toolbox.

To prove this point, Wittgenstein asks us to think of how we learned such words as “beautiful” and “good”. These terms begin as gestures. We learn to associate the word “beautiful” with the gestures of a person seeing something that they find beautiful, or the gestures that we personally make on instinct when presented with something beautiful. The gesture, then, is merely a more primitive language version of the interjection. In fact, the gesture is entirely interchangeable with any number of interjections. The sentence “the tree is green” conveys something that no gesture could. It is, in and of itself the primitive for conveying its message. On the other hand, when we say “wow” or, “the tree is beautiful”, we are really saying nothing more than our gesture could say. For this reason, there is something of a vacuity of meaning in aesthetic statements as spoken language. Here, we see Wittgenstein’s famous proposition from the Tractatus come into play. We truly cannot speak about aesthetic reactions because words serve us no better than primitive gestures.

Aesthetic gestures come largely in the form of approval. If I am fond of a suit, I may say “this is a beautiful suit”, I may say simply “Ah!”, or I may just wear it regularly and make remarks about it to friends. Any way it is done, I am expressing my approval of it. Wittgenstein thinks it absurd to attempt to give a causal reason for the fact that I approve of something aesthetically. Such a judgment has no mechanism, and he charges that everyone who attempts to instill in it a mechanism (e.g.: Kant, with his explanation of why we make certain judgments about what is beautiful and sublime) is simply doing so after the fact in an attempt to make aesthetics governable by the laws of physics. Since aesthetic judgments are psychological phenomena and not physical ones, they are governed by the laws of psychology, of which there are few. For this reason, Wittgenstein believes that aesthetic judgments must be considered subjective, at least until we can assemble a body of psychological laws that allows us to predict human behavior.

While the judgements themselves are subjective, Wittgenstein believes that there is some standard by which aesthetic judgments can be more or less correct. Two men may like the same object, but one may know more about its background and thereby be said to “appreciate” it more. Wittgenstein tells us that appreciation comes from experience of a thing. A white British man may see two statuettes carved by the Maasai in Kenya in the British Museum and be particularly struck by the one on the right. A Maasai may see the same two figures and make the same judgment (preferring the one on the right), but we would say that he appreciates the figure more than the white man because he knows how it would be used, he has seen them made, etc. He has a cultural training that the white man lacks (Cf. Hume). For this reason, we trust his judgment above the white man’s. In much the same way, we trust our tailor’s judgment over our own when considering the proper cut, lapel size, etc. of a suit.

Works Cited:

Monk, Ray. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. Penguin Books, New York (1990).

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Ed.: Cyril Barrett. Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief. Basil Blackwell, Oxford (1967).

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Transl.: C. K. Ogden. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Dover Publications, Mineola, NY (1999).

The Other Half - An Art Historical Commentary and Visual Companion to Philosophical Aesthetics from Plato to Gadamer

2009-11-30T08:15:00.000-08:00

Hey guys.

Here is a fairly short presentation on art in conjunction with our discussions and texts from class. I hope you enjoy it! And if you have any questions or comments, I am happy to field them.

Thanks!

The Other Half Part I Artwork

View more presentations from smithjacobm.

Proper Appreciation of Art

2009-11-30T06:37:00.000-08:00

Recently in class we have been discussing the changes that technology has brought to the idea of art. Specifically, Benjamin argues that new means of production have resulted in a new perception of art in which unique existence is substituted for a mass existence. Does this change in perception mean that we must interpret all works free from historical context? John Fisher and Jason Potter in their article “Technology, Appreciation, and the Historical View of Art”, asks how we can reconcile the rift between the two perceptions of what work is.

In order to bridge this gap Fisher and Potter first set out to demonstrate how this divide has formed in the manner of our appreciation of art in the modern world. Museums’ remove murals from the walls of churches and I-pod players remove music from their live production and in doing so they help to destroy the arts authenticity, which is essential to its identity. Anyone who has witnessed the works of art in person will agree that the identity of the work itself is undoubtedly bound to the being in the presence of the art or the performance. Modern pop music is a perfect example of how the loss of aura has lead to a shift in how we view the music itself. Most pop songs lack many links to context, there are released as singles with no other music and are intended for the mass consumption of the song on radios and mp3 players. The public takes in this music with the intention of passing time or making the song fit their mood while driving in the car and this fundamental shift in music reduces it from a spiritual experience with its own aura to just “sound patterns”. This type of appreciation changes the way in which people come to interpret all works of art because the existence of true historical works of art are drowned out by market demand for easily available works of art. Godamer suggests that this kind of reduction has reduced the world to equipment in which we look as art like a pop song, asking question like how can I incorporate this picture or song into my life for my purposes.

Fisher and Potter suggest that three different theories exist for looking at art. The “presentational theorists” argue that art is free from context and history while the “historical reductionists” argue that the artwork is completely reliant on their historical context. “Historical contextualists” bridge this continuum by suggesting that the artwork has value historically as well acontextually. The method of appreciation that has been introduced by modern art is equally as valid as appreciation with consideration for history. Both ends of the contextual continuum fail to fully describe what it is that a person can gain in the experience in art. That is why it is only possible to fully gain an idea of a work of art by considering it as a Historical contextualist standpoint. It is much like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle which suggests that position and momentum of an electron cannot be know at the same time. The more one interacts with the electron to determine its position the more it interferes with its momentum and vice versa. Likewise, the more one views an artwork historically the more they devalue the relevance of the work outside of that context.

Fisher, John and Potter, James. Technology, Appreciation, and the Historical View of Art, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Vol. 55, No2 Spring 1997

Applying Heidegger to Fiction

2009-11-30T01:17:00.000-08:00

Note: My presentation is not is long as it appears to be. I could not find a link to the short story excerpt, so I had to simply type it out and paste it to the bottom of my entry. It would probably make sense to go ahead and read it before reading my presentation.

My favorite class readings have been the excerpts from Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art. I am particularly interested in Heidegger’s claim that a work of art sets forth the happening of truth, because this resonates strongly with some of my own views. Unfortunately, I think that this claim’s strength suffers from a weakness prevalent throughout Heidegger’s work: a surprising lack of concrete examples. Abstract concepts and theories offered in isolation run the risk of ambiguity. While they are important in pointing us in a certain direction, they should be grounded with illustrative examples.

As I already mentioned, I support Heidegger’s claim about the aim of artwork. However, I want to carefully analyze one of the few examples he does offer—his application of this claim to Vincent van Gogh’s A Pair of Shoes—in order to draw out as much information as possible. Then, through the use of a couple of my own concrete examples, I hope to bolster his argument. I will attempt to apply his concepts to another famous painting, Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, with the hope of showing that his intriguing theory remains relevant even when Heidegger has not handpicked the work in question. Finally, I will apply his aesthetic philosophy to an excerpt from one of my favorites short stories, William Gay’s Where Will You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You?, in order to further illustrate his claim and also to stretch the realm of application beyond painting.

van Gogh link: http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/gogh/html/rotate/009.htm

Heidegger argues that van Gogh’s painting, A Pair of Shoes, is a work of art that achieves this assigned goal. In other words, he feels that it sets forth the happening of truth. The work accomplishes this task by allowing us an unencumbered view of the subject matter. When we look at the shoes in the painting, we are able to escape from traditional modes of seeing. In a sense, we are liberated. We are able to see the shoes for what they truly are at their essence or we are able to “leave the thing to rest in its own self, for instance, in its thing-being” (662).

At first glance, such a claim is odd. How could this painting reveal to us the true essence of peasant shoes when it doesn’t even appear to be a representation that is completely realistic? Among other problems, for instance, sudden eruptions of white paint appear in places that should be covered in shadow. Furthermore, almost every brush stroke is legible. However, Heidegger explains that what is important, “is not the reproduction of some particular entity that happens to be present at any given time; it is, on the contrary, the reproduction of the thing’s general essence” (666). Heidegger feels that the work has captured this essence and goes on to explain, rather poetically, exactly what this entails:

From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of [the peasant women’s] slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind… (664)

Heidegger’s rant continues on for several more lines. His point is simply that these details that have been captured by the picture are what makeup the true essence of a pair of peasant shoes.

In providing us with this essence, Heidegger goes on to argue that the work discloses a world to us as viewers. The details reveal to us the world of the peasant, and according to Heidegger, this world disclosure allows for the happening of truth. It is important to note that, for Heidegger, a world is more than simply a “collection of the countable or uncountable, familiar and unfamiliar things that are just there” (672). In other words, the peasant woman’s world, which has been revealed to us in the painting, is not revealed by the mere representation of the boots. Rather, we are brought into this world because the shoes express to us the reality of peasant life.

Heidegger explains that when a work discloses a world, it instigates a sort of struggle between concealedness and unconcealedness. In van Gogh’s painting, certain elements of peasant life are revealed to us. At the same time, these realities spark new curiosities concerning this world, and as a result, we realize that other facts are concealed from us. As viewers we embark on a circular process in which we move back and forth from concealedness to unconcealedness. According to Heidegger, this is the happening of truth.

Edward Hopper link: http://eaobjets.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/hopper-nighthawks.jpg

Unlike A Pair of Shoes, Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks is not merely a representation of a single thing. Rather, it is a representation of an entire scene full of things. There are buildings in the background, a diner, saltshakers, people, etc. Certainly, the essence of the painting as a whole could never be arrived at by viewing the individual things that make up the scene. However, through the juxtaposition of light and darkness, through the use of different hues, and through the arrangement of the people at the bar, the true essence of the scene is felt. When one views the painting, he perhaps gathers from the mysterious men seated at the bar and covered with shadows that something dangerous is going down. Or, perhaps, one notes the giant window and feels the customers’ great vulnerability. Maybe something horrible is lurking just around the corner and is on its way. Or maybe it’s something else. Regardless though, something about the scene is ominous, and although we may not be able to place our finger on why, this is what the image is really about.

Through the sensing of this essence, a world is disclosed to us—a world of eerie late-night danger. In turn, through the disclosure of this world, a battle is instigated inside the painting’s viewers. They embark on the circular process as they move from concealedness—at first this world is completely unknown to them—to unconcealedness—the painting reveals this world—and then back to concealedness—new curiosities, such as the ones mentioned above, arise out of this disclosure. Thus, truth happens.

Although William Gay’s short story, Where Will You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You?, is done in a much different medium, Heidegger’s aesthetic philosophy is still applicable. The story is centered around a group of meth-ruined Southerners, the character Emile being one of them. The selected excerpt is a short story in itself and it tells of his degradation. This tiny work of art is made up of not only several things but also several images that are themselves made up of things. While, as I already mentioned, the piece is truly about degradation and Emile’s horrible route, this essence cannot be arrived at by merely looking at the isolated things or images through a traditional lens. For instance, if I were to take the image of Emile’s customers asking him to take down his mother’s embroidered sampler, the essence of the collective passage would be lost or at least damaged. However, when this image is taken along with the several other vivid images, Emile’s horrific world is revealed to us. Mention of Emile’s better days evoke sympathy and also understanding. We see him partying his way to doom. Images of him selling off vital pieces of farm equipment point us once again to what has been lost while simultaneously providing us with the next step in his slow demise. Then, we see Emile finally, in desperation, resort to creating a meth lab. This, combined with the other images, completes the curious transformation of a man as well as a property. After reading the passage, we are fully aware of how such degradation has occurred.

This detailed explanation serves as the disclosing of a sort of world—the horrific world that Emile has fashioned for himself and is now trapped in. The disclosure of this world sets Heidegger’s circular process in motion. Through disclosure, certain realities become unconcealed. For instance, the reader is educated on how such a fall might be possible. However, at the same time, the reader grows curious. He formulates hundreds of questions that Gay has left unanswered. He wonders, perhaps, what first turned Emile down such a path? Perhaps he struggles to imagine the beginnings of Emile’s addictions, or whatever else might especially strike the reader. The potential questions are endless. Yet, whatever they might be, the very process the reader is sent on as he travels back and forth from concealedness to unconcealedness signifies the happening of truth.

William Gay excerpt:

Emile himself had fallen on hard times. Once the scion of a prosperous farm family, now he could only look back on long-lost days that where bathed in an amber haze of nostalgia. He’d inherited all this and for a while there were wonders. Enormous John Deere cultivators and hay balers and tractors more dear than Rolls-Royces. For a while there was coke and crack and wild parties. Friends unnumbered and naked women rampant in their willingness to be sent so high you couldn’t have tracked them on radar, sports cars that did not hold up so well against trees abutments.

Little by little, Emile had sold things off for pennies on the dollar and day by day the money rolled through his veins and into his lungs, and the greasy coins trickled down his throat. The cattle were sold away or wandered off. Hogs starved and the strong ate the weak. It amazed him how easily a small fortune could be pissed away. Money don’t go nowhere these days, Emile said when he was down to selling off stepladders and drop cords.

Finally he was down to rolling his own, becoming an entrepreneur, slaving over his meth lab like some crazed alchemist at his test tubes and brazier on the brink of some breakthrough that would cleanse the world of sanity forever.

The appalled ghost of Emile’s mother haunted these rooms, hovered fretfully in the darker corners. Wringing her spectral hands over doilies beset with beer cans and spilled ashtrays. Rats tunneling in secret trespass through the upholstery. There were man-shaped indentations in the Sheetrock walls, palimpsest cavities with outflung arms where miscreants had gone in drunken rage. JESUS IS THE UNSEEN LISTENER TO EVERY CONVERSATION, an embroidered sampler warned from the wall. There were those of Emile’s customers who wanted it taken down or turned to the wall. Emile left it as it was. He needs an education, Emile would say. He needs to know what it’s like out here in the world. There’s no secrets here.

Works Cited:

Philosophies of Art and Beauty. Ed. Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1964.

The Best American Short Stories. Ed. Stephen King and Heidi Pitlor. Houghton Mifflin: New York, 2007.

The Private Art Market in the "Age of Technological Reproducibility"

2009-11-29T19:24:00.000-08:00

While Professor Grady’s intended point was taken, it is an entirely separate issue with the sale of the Warhol print, an article on which was used as a question of ‘original’ over the past few classes, that really struck me each time it was discussed—the fact that a Warhol was sold in a private art auction at all. In his book, “Eye Witness: Reports from an Art World in Crisis,” Jed Perl (who I imagine looking like this <--- But who actually looks like this ---> ) details what he deems wrong with the art world, and specifically, the modern private art market. Much of what he has to say begins with Andy Warhol, founding member of the Pop movement and object of widespread fame and mystery. Warhol’s art theory is based fundamentally on conceptualism and it just so happened that Andy, originally “Warhola,” born in Pittsburg Pennsylvania in 1928 to eastern European parents who enforced strong catholic values and coddled their alienated son after his development of both Scarlet Fever and severe hypochondria which left him at home in bed many weeks out of the year, became enamored of the idea of fame. An artist by trade (he often called himself a “sellout” for his sometimes secret sale of advertisement cartoons and sketches in order to sustain his lifestyle), he abandoned most of what can be considered tradition and dismissed the idea of the authentic, while still creating something considered art. In this act, Warhol’s concept became not only a question of the validity of authenticity, but in his mass production, outspokenness on the universality of fame (“Everyone should have their 15 minutes of fame.”), and his fervent insistence on reaching the public produced the nagging question of whether art is really for the masses rather than for a select few. It is at this point that the private view of art shifted radically, eventually doubling on itself and achieving two extremes in a relatively short period of time.

Warhol’s availability in his artwork as well as as a well known figure got the public to look at art. And I mean the actual public—the people you meet at gas stations in Indiana, the apathetic youth, the people that called Pollock “Jack the Dripper.” Throughout his lifetime, an almost morbid fascination with the man as well as with his artwork was all the rage (which means all the kids that want to be hip now have to hate him for unjustified reasons, but I digress). If the art major has learned anything from her structural engineer, business owning father, it’s that nothing is a stronger driving force in our culture than money, and thus nothing put dollar signs in the eyes of smart men more than Andy Warhol. He had a huge public, with small overhead cost, and just the right combination of authenticity and reproducibility to drive up the cost of such items. By the end of his life, Warhol’s idea that art was for everyone had been capitalized upon to the extent that his actual art was primarily for the privileged. Most people didn’t know or care that most of the actual printing was done by Warhol’s man-slave (or chief assistant if you prefer) Gerard Malanga.

**Come on, it's Tattoo from Fantasy Island! No? He and Malanga were both diligent man servants. Look it up, it's funny I promise.**

With this movement toward art as a status symbol came the popularized private art market. Art gradually became something that everyone wanted and very few could afford. As demand increased, so did prices, furthering the elitism of owning a work of art. In the 80’s, the graffiti art boom opened up new doors as dealers started popping up in art rich cultures like New York city. A smart dealer like Mary Boone, Henry Geldzahler, or Annina Nosei,( who, after buying Jean-Michele Basquiat’s career, kept him living in her basement on a constant stream of drugs, churning out painting after painting) could control the flow of an artist’s work—either holding back 75% of the work, or flooding the market, literally making or breaking the artist’s career. Certain artists capitalized on the economy of artwork themselves—genius business man, but abhorrent artist Thomas Kinkcade opened his own stores, bypassing critics, galleries, and the market to benefit himself solely, and Keith Herring set up The Pop Shop,
an entire store featuring everyday items adorned with his work. Each of these steps leads us to the capitalized market we see today, where museum curators are contextualist as well as consumerist rather than recognizing the inherent value of an artwork.

So (I know that was a long introduction to me actually talking about the text), Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility lends itself to the debate over whether or not the private art market, itself a paradox, is the right fit for artwork in this age. It seems that Benjamin’s points argue directly against a market art scene and for a museum based ideology. In section III, Benjamin claims that “in even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking; the here and now of the work of art…” and goes on to say “It is this unique existence—and nothing else—that bears the mark of the history to which the work has been subject.” [21] This aura of the work is what moves us, something of which the public is deprived in the private acquisition of artworks. Works which are privately owned without being installed in some public venue ask the public to rely on photographic reproduction to experience the piece, stripping it of its aura and denying history of a section of its complexity.

Further issues with the reliance on technological reproducibility after the private purchase of an artwork exist. Benjamin truthfully claims that “replicating the work many times over substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence,” [22] which can be a dangerous slope. Most individuals exposed primarily to reproductions lack a proper appreciation of the aura of an artwork. If we allow ourselves to collectively forget that a painting is very different than a photograph of a painting, it’s easy to see how artistic authenticity can become entirely obsolete in a way that alters both the history and the future of art. The individual acquisitions of artworks that belong in museums rob the pieces of their here-and-now presence in the world, and weaken the quality of museums, thus limiting their reach, and changing “the entire mode of existence of human collectives…[and] their mode of perception.” [23]
In section IV of Technological Reproducibility Benjamin says “the desire of the present-day masses to ‘get closer’ to things and their equally passionate concern for overcoming each thing’s uniqueness by assimilating it as a reproduction,” is the primary link between the aura and the “social basis of its decay.” [23] Private art as a status symbol furthers this decay with the aid of technological reproducibility by allowing reproductions to stand as sufficient in cases where originals are a commodity. The uniqueness of an original becomes extraordinary in its uniqueness since uniqueness itself has been more or less obliterated in reproduction, making it even more desirable as a rarity. This is a cycle which does naught but cheapen the value of artistic expression by creating a monetary primary importance, and allowing reproductions to stand as artworks in the absence of true aura. Benjamin might even go on to argue that this acts as a type of historical censorship, allowing certain truths to exist in our common world, and others to be reproduced in or even removed from our collective consciousness. To preserve the authenticity of art work, integrity of museums, and artistic expression, the private art market must regress to a time when an artist would gain notoriety for work with inherent value rather than monetary value.

So, basically the fact that a Warhol was sold at auction for 22 million dollars strikes me as ironic every time. History preserved Warhol’s obsession with fame and money by destroying his idea of art for the masses.

As a side note, one of my favorite stories in art deals with Ray Johnson (MY FAVORITE! Watch How to Draw a Bunny. Just do.) and his friend Dorothy Podber, who (according to lore) stopped by The Factory one day unannounced where Dorothy proceeded to pull out a pistol from her bag and shoot through a pile of Marilyns stacked against a wall calling it performance art. Ray and Dorothy were, of course, asked to please not do that again, but the shot Marilyns are much more coveted than the average--evidence that signs of authenticity are appreciated.

Being-Towards-Death and the Sublime

2009-11-29T18:04:00.000-08:00

Immanuel Kant's conception of nature is one that exists in a realm of absolutely necessary causal laws. According to Kant, time and space are pure intuitions of our faculty of sensibility, and our concepts of physical laws, like causation, are pure intuitions of our faculty of understanding. Our sensory experience is therefore processed by our faculty of sensibility, organizing what appears to us according to our intuitions of time and space. It is in this way that sublime is an experience in which our human freedom encounters it's limitation, as the overwhelming experience of an incomprehensible phenomenon of nature enables us to realize our rational subordination to it. That is to say that our sense of the sublime a part of our faculty of reason. When apprehending a phenomenon of nature, we perceive it as bewildering or even edifying. This puts us in touch with ideas of rationality or what we can comprehend. It is in this way that sublimity resides not in the object of our perception but in reason itself. It is within the faculty of reason itself to identify it's limitations, however, without an experience of this limitation, of the sublime or something like it, we would not be able to identify these limitations.

A parallel experience to that of the sublime is Heidegger's understanding of "being-towards-death." For Heidegger, one's own existential reality is defined by his/her inescapable finitude - everyone dies. Being-towards-death is not a concept that is supposed to bring us closer to physical death itself but rather it is a mode of existence. For Heidegger, death is determined by its inevitability, but an authentic being-towards-death is one that understands the indeterminate nature of one's own inevitable death - as no one knows how, why, when or where they are going to die.

At the very outset of life, there is always the possibility for death. Any projections or possibilities of what could happen in the future are inseparable from the past or present. For Hiedegger, death is not some simple linear physical degradation or a lofty idea of what could happen, but rather, death is contained within one's own life. In this way, Heideggers conception of death is not meant to place death outside of us or at some indeterminate future but rather proposes that a person's death is ever-present in one's self.

Similarly, an experience of the sublime, whether it be a swirling mass of clouds or a vastly large ocean, brings our limitation into appearance. We recognize ourselves as something more than a given set of determinate relations bound by laws of nature. Because of this experience, we are able to recognize ourselves as freedoms existing within physical and rational boundaries. An experience of the sublime is one that is both alienating and engaging at the same time. We begin to recognize ourselves as distinctly separate from the natural phenomenon apprehended. Through this separation we understand that there are some things that are our of our control, yet it is the lack of control that draws us in and sparks our curiosity. Conversely, being-towards death is not founded in experience but rather a lack of experience. One's own death is only experienced by the individual and, according to the nature of death, is inexpressible. There is no possible way that one can reflect upon one's death in the same way that one can reflect upon an experience of the sublime. However, both contain acknowledgments of limitations that are not simply exterior to one's self, but rather, a part of one's being. For Heidegger, death is a necessary consequence of life and can be found within life itself. In the same way, it seems that limitation, and an acknowledgment of that limitation, is a necessary consequence of having a rational faculty at all.

Both Heidegger's being-towards-death and Kant's conception of the sublime indicate a confrontation with one's own finitude, followed by an overcoming of this finitude. Both concepts are described as deeply alienating yet severely engaging. For Heidegger, being-toward-death calls ones individual self out of it's situation in the world, and is edifying insofar as it allows one to re-evaluate one's life from the standpoint of one's own mortality. A feeling of "angst" or anxiety concerning the paradox between freedom and finitude may follow from this realization. However, this angst is not fixated on an object, but instead, one is anxious about one's existence in general - how one should go about living one's life or designing one's self. It is this realization of what is hidden, the truth, as well as the existence of hiddenness itself, the fact that the truth is hidden, that can bring us closer to the truth in general.

In the same way, an experience of the sublime is one's own and no one else's. It is a personal, subjective experience that is difficult to give an account of. One simply must experience the sublime in order to understand it. In this way, Kant's conception of the sublime is similar to Heidegger's "being-towards-death" insofar as they expose the limitations of human freedom and reasoning and contextualize an individual's existence in the world. It is through my acknowledgment that I am a singular individual that that is fated to die just like every other human being that I begin to realize my limitations. Additionally, an awareness of my mortality enables me to see a the world as a larger thing than myself or what I can perceive. The Alps covered in snow standing before me are not just a visually stunning and emotionally provocative phenomenon but a reminder of my own mortality, as the Alps existed before me and will exist after me. The life span of something in nature is completely beyond my intuitive comprehension, and it is in this way that the sublime renders me dumbfounded. The Alps transcends my understanding in the same way that the world outside of myself transcends my mortality.

In both Heidegger's account of death and Kant's account of the sublime, the person who is the subject of the experience must encounter his/her finite existence and find meaning. In the case of the sublime, it is less clear that finding meaning is a result of that experience. Additionally, it is probably not the intention of Kant to point to an existential crisis created in the viewer of a sublime phenomenon. However, both accounts aim to elucidate the limitations of human freedom and therefore human existence. It seems that both Heidegger and Kant agree that not only are there limitations to human freedom, but that these limitations are internal. Perhaps we need outside experience in order to illuminate this tension, but it seems to be completely within the realm of the individual to make of that experience what they will. In both cases, anxiety seems more than likely to occur when encountering the sublime as well as grappling with being-towards-death. Both enable a confrontation with the limitations of human rationality and freedom in a personal and even frightening manner.

Writing and Interpretation

2009-11-29T11:09:00.000-08:00

In September, I posted an article by Jean-Paul Sartre titled “What is Writing?” The essay is concerned primarily with differentiating prose writing from other sorts of art—explicitly visual art and poetry. It’s a great article; if you didn’t read it before I’d suggest reading it now if you have the time (which, alas, you probably don’t). Since September, we’ve worked with several writers with close ties to Sartre, so I’d like to look beyond Sartre’s differentiation of prose and poetry to what that means for art. Heidegger and Gadamer seem relevant here.

With Heidegger we learned about the hermeneutic circle, or the idea that all knowledge or understanding is a continuous cycle of interpretation, in which the unfamiliar or concealed becomes disclosed, and the familiar becomes foreign. This conception of knowledge runs counter to modernist iterations (i.e. Locke’s tabula rasa, the idea that we begin life with a sort of blank slate on which the world writes through experience) in that it presupposes some sort of inherent understanding about the world; neither the completely alien nor the completely familiar have any bearing on our experience. This is reflected in Heidegger’s assertion that we must take for granted the “thingness” of an object-to-be-interpreted before we can perform any sort of interpretation. This is what phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty and hermeneutic philosophers like Gadamer are getting at when they use the phrase “always already;” we are always already experiencing the world because we live within it. As such, we cannot hope to view the world objectively or from outside ourselves, something Nagel terms the “view from nowhere.”

For Heidegger, all this means that artwork should disclose something: that truth itself is disclosure. Art makes the unfamiliar familiar and vice versa; this is its sort of first-order function. More than that, though, art shows us that truth is itself an act of disclosure. It seems to me that Gadamer’s view on abstract art falls into this articulation as well; by depicting color and shape rather than things, abstract artists more directly arrive at the Heideggerian goal of disclosure about disclosure. Abstract art takes such recognizable and familiar concepts as color and shape and arranges them in a foreign way; humans tend to experience these concepts as aspects of things rather than things-in-themselves, and so the experience of, say, a Rothko painting (example, "No.3/No.13," to the left), requires a new sort of interpretive engagement with the work, one that leads to a realization of the interpretive act itself.

Here we come to the ultimate difference between prose writing and visual art. Sartre puts it this way: “The writer can guide you and, if he describes a hovel, make it seem the symbol of social injustice and provoke your indignation. The painter is mute. He presents you with a hovel, that’s all. You are free to see in it what you like” (27). With this, Sartre differentiates writing from other artforms, including poetry, by showing that writing utilizes representational language to convey meaning; it is not the images depicted in the writing that have meaning (as in poetry), but the language used to present these images: “The art of prose is employed in discourse; its substance is by nature significative—that is, the words are first of all not objects but designations for objects. It is not first of all a matter of knowing whether they please or displease in themselves; it is a matter of knowing whether they correctly indicate a certain thing or a certain notion. Thus, it often happens that we find ourselves possessing a certain idea that someone has taught us by means of words without being able to recall a single one of the words which have transmitted it to us” (35). Our experience of a novel may be tied to the language used by the author, but the take-away is largely representational; we remember things like plot, character, and narration, but we can remember these things without necessarily remembering the author’s language. To remember an artwork, one must remember the content of the piece rather than its external reference.

To choose to convey an idea through prose, then, is to choose action by disclosure—to act such that “nobody can be ignorant of the world” (38). While a painter may disclose the world by presenting something in the world, thus making it available for interpretation, the writer actively imbues such an image with potential meanings beyond the image itself. This is, to a great extent, a function of language, which Sartre positions as a key factor in perception: “We are within language as within our body. We feel it spontaneously while going beyond it towards other ends, as we feel our hands and our feet; we perceive it when it is someone else who is using it, as we perceive the limbs of others” (35). The function of style is to push the reader through and give value to the content of the prose, but not to be self-evident: content is what matters—language and style change to fit the subject. “In prose the aesthetic pleasure is pure only if it is thrown in into the bargain” (39).

So it seems that prose writing can have the same effect as visual art insofar as both require the viewer (or reader or audience) to interact with and interpret the work, thus fulfilling Heidegger’s assertion that art discloses the truth of disclosure. However, writing extends past visual art in that it refers to something beyond itself; moreover, the interpretive task the reader faces is more complex. While both a novel and a painting can have a multitude of viable interpretations, the novel has certain “landmarks” set by the author, a sort of roadmap for potential meanings. The reader/viewer, though, bears the responsibility of creating the meaning of the work (this is a fancy way of saying that we get from an interpretive object what we put into it; a work is only meaningful when its audience interprets it). While it seems unlikely that there could be a “bad” or “wrong” interpretation of a visual artwork (this is arguable, but I’m working here with abstract art in mind, which would seem to place few restrictions—if any—on interpretation), the written work has a certain limit to interpretation. This comes less from the author than the interpretive community in which the work takes hold, which is to say that certain interpretations of a work come to be considered “correct”—or at least compelling—as a result of the metaphorical “vocabulary” of the community critically examining the work. The task of the reader, then, is to interpret individual or personal meaning from a work without losing sight of the actual content of the work itself.

Works Cited
Sartre, Jean-Paul. “What is Writing?” What is Literature? Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988. pp. 25-47.

Photography and Misinformation

2009-11-28T19:33:00.000-08:00

On the recent 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, French President Nicolas Sarkozy posted a picture on his facebook page which he claimed showed himself helping to take down the wall the night the authorities declared the East-West border open. A couple of days later, French papers published evidence that the picture was actually taken a week after the wall fell, rather than the night of. Even after a complete refutation of Sarkozy's claim, though, the President refused to admit that he had lied. Reading Morris' piece on the Iranian missile launch reminded me of this article (linked here) because both highlight the ease and the dangers of simply trusting, or expecting, photos to show the truth.

I think the fake is also an example of how photography has undermined what Benjamin called the aura resulting from a thing's unique existence. It seems like in lying about the real context of his photo, Sarkozy was trying to add to an normal picture an aura of uniqueness that would in turn reflect well upon him. As a result, while the age of reproduction may have resulted in the destruction of aura with things whose unique existence suddenly become a mass existence, perhaps another danger is that the ease of reproduction has allowed people to fake an aura of uniqueness, or add on a seemingly more impressive aura of uniqueness, to a merely commonplace reproduction. This second damage to the authenticity of aura is highlighted in the photos at the bottom of the article (linked again here) sent to two French newpapers in which Sarkozy appears in famous historical events, from the Yalta Conference to the JFK assassination.

Longinus, Burke, and Kant: Origins of the Sublime

2009-11-28T18:57:00.000-08:00

While our discussion of the sublime in class was centered on Kant’s philosophy, the concept of the sublime has been continuously developed throughout the history of aesthetics. This paper will focus on three influential figures with regards to the defining of the sublime: the Greek philosophy and writer Dionysius Longinus, the 18^th Century Irish philosopher Edmund Burke, and Kant. Through examining each of their takes on what the sublime is, and where it springs from, the goal is to lay out a broader appreciation on what the sublime has been interpreted to be.

The concept of the sublime is first attributed to the Greek critic Dionysius Longinus. In his work Peri Hupsos or On Sublimity, written in the first century A.D., Longinus writes that “the sublime is a certain eminence or perfection of language, and that the greatest writers, both in verse and prose, have by this alone obtained their prize of glory, and filled all time with their renown” (23). Addressing the question of where the sublime exists that it can be brought out by language, Longinus gives five sources: 1) through boldness and grandeur of thoughts; 2) through the raising of passions to their highest degree; 3) through the skillful application of both feeling and language in writing; 4) through the use of graceful expression; and 5) through a dignified and grand composition of sentences (23). The common theme in each case is stretching and surpassing rationality through thoughts made grand in writing, thoughts that pull the audience out of their common ideas and into a larger arena, forcing the audience to think and perceive in a mode beyond normality.

In Phillip Shaw’s book The Sublime, he describes Longinus’ depiction of the sublime as ravishing, or even raping the audience. In Longinus’ words, the successful incorporation of the sublime in language, thought, and literature endues works “with a strength irresistible” that “strikes home, and triumphs over every hearer,” (23) transporting the audience members from their individual feelings into collective awe of the literary work. The sublime, then, is the masterfully crafted force of language so powerful that it overcomes rationality, causing the audience to submit to incomprehensible feelings, and leaving them overwhelmed and in awe of the experience that transported them into a realm of sentiment beyond description. It does not lay waiting in an object ready to leap out at those who happen upon it, or is feeling that can be recognized in nature at all, but rather is an overcoming of conventional thought that is created and brought out through powerful language.

Another important aspect of Longinus’ depiction of the sublime is its apparent compatibility with the concept of beauty. As only the greatest, most talented, and ingenious writers and thinkers could produce the sublime, these works were at the same time beautiful and well loved. The sublime and the beautiful, then, work hand in hand, with the sublime experience being at the same time an experience of beauty that surpasses normal limitations of thought and sentiment.

Although Longinus’ On the Sublime was written in the first century A.D., it was largely absent in aesthetic debate until the 17^th Century, and only gained real prominence after its translation into French in 1674. Most 17^th and 18^th philosophers agreed with and developed upon Longinus’ account of the sublime as primarily drawn out of thought and language, and particularly in literature and poetry. The sublime remained attached to concepts of beauty as well, as neither were thought to be completely exclusive of the other in their traits and in their portrayal. However, in 1759 Irish philosopher Edmund Burke challenged these notions with his treatise “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.” While Longinus argued that the sources of the sublime ultimately lay in the power of thought and literature, Burke refuted this account of the sublime’s origin when he wrote “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say whatever is conversant about terrible objects or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime” (131).

Consequently, instead of citing language and thought as the sublime’s origin, Burke’s argument is that the sublime is essentially a reaction to an object of terror, a thing that produces a horror which is “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” (131). As a result, although Longinus and Burke still agree that the sublime in effect wrenches the individual away from normality by an incomprehensible feeling, their ascription of the origin of the sublime is drastically different. According Longinus, the sublime is created by humans through an elevation of language and thought to their highest, most overpowering levels, pulling individuals out of their comfort zones into a feeling of incomprehension. Burke’s account, though, is that the sublime exists within objects that produce a feeling of potential pain. Although the sublime can never be pain itself, since “when danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible,” (131) it exists in the feeling of delight that occurs when recognizing the potential for pain without actually feeling it. Consequently, Burke argues that the sublime is not dependent on language for its evocation, but perhaps is best felt when encountering natural objects that produce a delightful fear.

Burke goes even further in accounting for the sublime’s origin with his descriptions of terror and power as the two primary sources. Describing fear as the mere thought of the actual pain, Burke argues that “whatever therefore is terrible, with regard to sight, is sublime too, whether this cause of terror be endued with greatness of dimensions or not” (133). In other words, the sublime is not a reaction to the grand scope of a thought, as it is described by Longinus, but rather by the terror evoked by an object of thought, whether that object is big or small. Similarly, the sublime can be elicited both from objects of sight or of thought, as both have the power to invoke terror without actually causing pain, and as such are both potential sources for the sublime.

With regards to thoughts or objects that do not immediately inspire fear or terror, Burke says that there is “nothing sublime which is not some modification of power” (137). Again, this fear of power can come from a big or small object, as well as simply from a thought. Burke connected power to a fear of pain when he wrote that “pain is always inflicted by a power in some way superior, because we never submit to pain willingly…strength, violence, pain and terror, are ideas that rush in upon the mind together” (137). Witnessing an animal or an object with immense power creates the sublime by recognition of the potential pain that could be caused by such force, even if the threat never materializes. An example of this fear of power may be witnessing an avalanche, as the sheer, destructive force of the landslide creates in the observer a feeling of the sublime due to recognizing the potential for pain even when fear itself is not present.

With his assertion that the origin of the sublime lies in objects of pain instead of in the grand working of thought, language, and literature, Burke provides a new perspective against Longinus that he further drives home with his portrayal of the sublime and the beautiful as antithetical forces. Longinus maintains that beauty and the sublime coincide, a claim supported by works of great literature in which the genius writer is able to lift the audience with the grand language of the sublime, which is also regarded as a beautiful writing. Burke argues, though, that beauty and the sublime are as opposed as night and day and can never coincide. This is because for Burke, unlike Longinus, one can never find the sublime beautiful, as the sublime is ultimately founded on an object that causes fear, while a beautiful object can never be sublime since the origin of beauty is in perceiving a pleasurable object (140).

Burke’s appreciation of the origin of the sublime sets the stage for Kant’s ideas that we discussed in class. Similar to Burke, Kant argues that sublime exists only in separation from the object being perceived; there is no sublimity in directly fearing for one’s life, but there is a sense of the sublime in recognizing that one’s life could be in danger. For example, Kant would agree that the avalanche elicits a feeling of the sublime to the extent the observer is removed from the actual path of destruction, and is therefore able to reflect upon the power of the landslide.

This reflection though, points to a likely split between Longinus, Burke, and Kant. Unlike the others, Kant posits that the origin of the sublime is in instances where the imagination, the sentiments, of the mind cannot grasp an object’s might, resulting in the transcendence of reason. An example of this is reflecting upon the infinite. Kant argues that when the mind tries to imagine such scope it ultimately fails due to imagination’s inability to picture what it has as its aim. Reason, on the other hand, tells the person that the infinite makes sense even though it is incomprehensible, and so triumphs over the failure of the imagination. The resulting sensation, of sentimental incomprehension that still makes rational sense, is the sublime.

As a result, Kant would reject Burke’s claim that the origin of the sublime is terror or the potential for pain. Instead, he would argue that the sublime comes from the failure of imagination to fully comprehend an object of immense terror or pain, which results in a feeling of delight brought on by the transcendence of reason. While both assert that this delight is a characteristic of the sublime then, each have different conclusions. Burke wants to stop at the sensation, saying that the sublime is simply the detachment from the potentially pain inducing object of perceived terror. Kant agrees that the sublime could not exist without the detachment, but argues that the delight of the sublime arises due to the superiority of reason over the failure of imagination to sensibly comprehend an object.

Consequently, as Burke went in a different direction than Longinus in searching for the sources of the sublime beyond the feelings elicited in language, thought, and writing, Kant went away Burke in looking beyond sentiments and feelings to the relation of these feelings to reason and to their inability to comprehend the objects they address. Kant’s conception has since drawn considerable debate, though, as separating the sublime and the beautiful too much from the actual objects that are directed towards. As a result, the divergent interpretations that Longinus, Burke, and Kant have of the sublime show that as a concept it is has undergone continuous changes and is still not well agreed upon. Noting these different opinions and theories, though, prompts questions such as whose understanding is actually right, whether the three philosophers discussed are each talking about different types of the sublime (or whether they are talking about the same thing at all), and what the underlying characteristics of the sublime actually are.

Works Cited

Shaw, Philip. The Sublime. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print.

Gadamer and Liturgy

2009-11-21T16:29:00.000-08:00

In one of H.G. Gadamer's seminal pieces, The Relevance of the Beautiful, he posits the ideas of play, symbol and festival as meaningful tools for the ways in which one can more practically and interactively engage a piece. His purpose in the essay is to explore whether or not modern art such as Duchamp's "readymade" conceptions can be evaluated under the same framework as Monet's "Lily Pond" or Chagall's "The Praying Jew". Gadamer claims that while our perception of art is historically contingent, the common feature of art, we find in the Ancient Greek conception of poietike episteme, or the knowledge and faculty appropriate to production. He says it nicely comparing Plato's craftsman in the Timeaus to the artist that persists through history:

What is common to the craftsman's producing and the artist's creating, and what distinguishes such from knowing from theory or from practical knowing and deciding, is that a work becomes separated from the activity…the common feature here is clearly the emergence of the work as the intended goal of regulated effort.[1]

Thus, just as a craftsman designs and produces a table or a watch, so to, the artist looks at a canvas and purposively projects a design of sorts. This design need not necessitate such detail as the mathematical precision of a still life, but rather the design comes from having art qua art or beauty as a telos. Acting with such regard is the means by which the beautiful for Gadamer, "enjoys universal recognition and assent…but serves no specific purpose". Art requires participation in the work; a primary and fundamental engagement that virtually begs the question "is this art?" Indeed, asking whether or not something is art is irrelevant; prima facie, it is the very fact of tradition, i.e. history, culture and language that establishes something as art. Art has no meaning apart from these contingencies. In this project, I am going to work to explicate Gadamer's ideas of the play, the symbol and the festival in relation to the writing of religious liturgy. Here, I will posit my own assertion that the performance of liturgy amongst a body of people is analogous to Gadamer's Aesthetic theory, in the sense that it serves the ontological function of the beautiful, that of bridging the chasm between the ideal and the real.

Just as the artwork is the focal point in determining a subjective experience of art itself, "so is the act of understanding similarly determined by the matter to be understood; as the experience of art reveals, not in spite of, but precisely because of the way it also conceals, so also is understanding possible. It is not in spite of, but again, precisely because of, its prior involvement."[2] Gadamer makes the comparison between experiencing an artwork and the concept of play. Indeed, play is not a "disengaged, disinterested" subjective experience; play is an interaction involving dialogue, asking the question, "is this art", and a reciprocal interpretive process. For Gadamer, this is a project of hermeneutical ontology; that is, when one stands in front of an art piece and readily engages it as art qua art, not only is the art interpreted into and made meaningful because of one's own subjective, historical conditioning, but moreover, the artwork in turn works to challenge the person's own ontological questions. Before the person had seen the artwork, this meaningful experience had not yet occurred; yet after the experience, the person is changed because of what she saw and experienced. As Gadamer nicely says, "My concern is not about what we do or what we ought to do, but rather, my concern lies in what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing." All art and artistry draws upon play in a fundamental way, the ways in which the audience of the artwork are of equal importance as the artist and the artwork themselves. If there were no audience, then the work of art, while not meaningless per se, would not posit influence to distinct, factical ontological entities.

Similarly, the conception of the symbol has its meaningfulness found within recollection and tradition. The symbol is supposed to remind us of something that we have already once known. He gives us the example from the Greek tradition, where Aristophanes tells us that:

Originally all human beings were spherical creatures. But later, on account of their misbehavior, the gods cut them in two. Thereafter, each of the halves, which originally belonged to one complete living being, seeks to be made whole once again. Thus every individual is a fragment or a symbolon tou anthropou.[3]

Thus, Gadamer's symbol is such that art is supposed to reflect for us what is not immediately apparent, but that seems to nevertheless "ring true or obvious". As humans are constantly trying to find the other side of their sphere, to be made whole again, they experience pieces of wholeness in their different encounters with art and with their present world. Moreover, it also serves an ontological function; it calls us to seek to understand ourselves within the artwork. We are drawn into the piece because it reflects something about ourselves that we "know" but must "recollect" and posit and interpret within the experience of art.

Just as the playful and the symbiotic relationships of the human and the experiences of art acts as a vehicle for understanding the hermeneutical "being" of both the art and the human, the festival works to show the historical placement, the "situatedness" of the being. Festivals are to be celebrated, they are an occasion that "lifts the participants out of their 'everydayness of existence' and elevates them into a kind of universal communion."[4] The festival is a gathering of people that is purposive, for the joining together to participate in a ritual or observance of a particular day, a factical joy or sorrow or perhaps for an unknown reason save the routine of doing it. An important aspect of the festival is that it creates its own time and space, but it is such that it cuts through daily time and space to a sort-of "positive parasitic relation". By that I simply mean that where time and space occur in their everydayness, when the festival occurs, everyday time and space still occur, but there is an additional bubble of time and space that exists both because of and in addition to, everyday time and space. Art is analogous to the experience of the festival, because it too creates this extra burst of time and space; it dislocates us from our everydayness and allows us to see our everydayness in a new light and with different regards to our daily experiences with the world; but moreover, it is the case that this experience is such that anyone who experiences the art will feel this dislocation. Thus, while people need not share an identical experience, it is the experience itself, which lends to the communal experience.

Hence, we have worked through explicating a few key aspects of Gadamer's aesthetic theory. As a personal anecdote, in my current internship, I am part of a staff of five or so people that writes religious liturgy for the different seasons of the ecumenical, liturgical calendar. Liturgies are the words of call and response between a church body and its leader (pastor, priest, clergy, etc.). For the past few months, we have been meeting to write the liturgy for the coming season of Advent, the weeks of waiting and preparation for Christmas. I find liturgy, both as a participant in the congregation and as a leader, an incredible functionary of reciprocal dialogue. Through the formulations of the words, we work to incorporate peace, justice, racial reconciliation and inclusive language. The words generally include basic statements of belief; not just about the overarching protestant faith but it also speaks to our daily role of peacemaking in the world. Through the weekly reiteration of these words, it establishes a community, it establishes commitments, and it gives rise to the power of language to work on individual factical ontologies. When I read and speak aloud statements of my belief each week, I am professing both to myself and to the world around me, who it is that I am--not in a transcendental, neutral framework, but in an interpretive, hermeneutical positioning of that specific time and place. The next week, I will be situated in a separate time and place and thus will occasion new words, and new understandings of those words in light of my recent factical experiences.

In the ways that it relates to Gadamer, a church service is similar to play in that it also is not a "disengaged and disinterested" experience. The reading of liturgy cannot happen in a space where there are not people. Rather, its very nature necessitates dialogue; it necessitates players participating with the dialogue. If people did not show up to take part in this "play", if people did not engage their specific roles within the experience of play, then the play would be utterly meaningless. Part of liturgy is the meaningful participation. I do not mean to imply that religion on the whole would be meaningless without players, but the weekly, repetitive functionary of a church service or liturgy recitation would be meaningless without this dialogical reciprocity. Symbiosis is derived from the Greek "syn" [with] and "biosis" [living], giving ways to the idea of the long-term interactions between different biological species. Gadamer's notion of the symbol seems to be a critical depiction of this. The church service, the people that actively engage in the liturgical readings engage with the rather parasitic history of the church and actively work to change and reshape history. Standing and participating is a way in which we recognize the wrongs the church has committed, but also verbally commit to working towards a new aim. We recollect our past situatedness and we make new claims in our new experiences, claims that incorporate our present world, claims that include rather than exclude, and hermeneutically function to make explicit the things in the world that are implicit or kept hidden (racial violence, domestic abuse, hate crimes on the GLBT community, homelessness, etc.). The function of the symbol of the church and the dialogue about beliefs are integral to the shaping of what happens "to us, in light of what it is that we are doing." Lastly, the conception of the festival is such that the specific hour each Sunday morning, apart from the ritual, tradition and historical situatedness that it holds would have no meaning whatever. However, by the very nature that at 11am on a Sunday morning, 200 or so people gather in a room to participate in the same festival-like experience. It grants the same "bubble" of time and space that disrupts our everydayness participation in the world. It is not merely because of a final telos that we gather; in a way, we gather because of this ritual. Being a part of the ritual is part of disclosing to us and to the world a piece of our own ontological searching and discovering.

Although there are some obvious discontinuities between the aesthetic experience and the experience of religious dialogue, the metonymic tools Gadamer provides, in turn provides a helpful resource in discovering the ways the participation in life can act as a moving, dislocating force to identifying one's situational being. Interestingly, with the rising of blog culture, liturgy is no longer something that is practiced only within a certain space. Moreover, with the rise of women taking leadership positions in a church, liturgy is no longer being written in only male (and Medieval) dominated language such as "Father-God", "King" and "Lord". There is a sense in which, not only has the very act of writing liturgy become a more socialized position, but the very language itself has become less hierarchical, less distant and more in tune with a personal congregation. When the language that people are speaking is a language that meets people in their familiar and contingent language, then it is such that the language does not demand distance, but rather, it is language that creates solidarity. When a telos for living (life) is created as opposed to working towards a final end, it seems to be the purpose of the church to create solidarity amongst themselves and then take that solidarity into the world to promote peace and wholeness.

[1] Gadamer, H.G. The Relevance of the Beautiful. Trans. Nicholas Walker. p. 12

[2] Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/

[3] Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful.

[4] Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful.

A Theological Perpective on Aesthetics

2009-11-18T14:10:00.000-08:00

Throughout the history of western thought, theology has been a persistent topic and many philosophies of aesthetics have sprouted from theology. Augustine, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Jonathan Edwards have all contributed to the topic of theological aesthetics. Beginning with Plato, art and physical beauty have been seen as connected with something divine: hopefully this condensed survey of religious aesthetics will help unpack this idea and provide us with more tools to discerning why artwork is important to us.

St. Augustine defines humankind as “animal, rational, and mortal” (Augustine 173). Reason allows us to connect pieces of our knowledge together and some humans are able to use reason as a guide to knowledge of God. Reason comes to us through language and thereby through hearing which leads Augustine to argue that human beings are most receptive to the form of art that is heard, i.e. music.

When we hear music (like this song from the 300s, around Augustine’s lifetime), we experience two types of pleasure: the pleasure from the senses and pleasure from reason. The reason why our rational capacity takes pleasure in art is because it has a sense of design or order. For example, music is made up of sound that is pleasing to the senses, e.g. we like to listen to clarinets, not nails on a chalkboard. Music also has a “certain rhythmic measure” (Augustine 175) that delights reason through the senses, which is why the clarinet must be making sound in some kind of order for us to delight in it as art.

Reason delights in beauty because it “wish[es] to be straightway transported to the most blessed contemplation of things divine” (Augustine 178). Although reason “realize[s] that nothing please[s] it but beauty” (Augustine 180), it begins to suspect that the order in beauty reveals universal truth. If the human being is not preoccupied with earthly beauty, he or she will be able to focus on God. In this way, Augustine’s argument is platonic: physical beauty in art is derived from an absolute, unchanging, eternal standard. However, Augustine adds that the connecting link between the two is a sense of order that is recognized by the rational side of our human nature.

Instead of giving aesthetics a subordinate role, Hans Urs von Balthasar prioritizes the idea of beauty as integral to our understanding of truth, God, and goodness. According to Balthasar, God creates the image for us and the image is an example of a form. A form is something that is indissoluble and greater than the sum of its parts. Examples of forms include the gospel, marriage, a human being and being a Christian (Balthasar 26-7). A form involves a kind of mystery whereby all of the imperfections of the constituent parts are transcended and a new kind of more real and more true thing is brought into being that cannot be explained by, say, Aristotle’s four causes. For example, I can not describe a human being to an alien by listing that person’s chemical and psychological properties or by reciting an evolutionary history or genealogy. Those are part of the person but none of them really capture the person (Balthasar 26).

All forms have beauty and Balthasar states that “the form as it appears to us is beautiful only because the delight that it arouses in us is founded upon the fact that, in it, the truth and goodness of the depths of reality itself are manifested and bestowed, and this manifestation and bestowal reveal themselves to us as being something infinitely and inexhaustibly valuable and fascinating” (Balthasar 118). Because forms are beautiful, Balthasar states that we naturally are enraptured by them. Balthasar uses the example of the Christian parable of the merchant who finds a pearl of great worth and sells everything he owns in order to buy it. The person who experiences beauty knows the immense value of it and will do apparently irrational things to obtain the thing. According to Balthasar, Christians similarily are enraptured by the beauty of Christ and will do anything to continue to experience it (Balthasar 33). In fact, in order to prophesy for God, prophets must necessarily be artists and present their message in a form of art, namely poetry (Balthasar 44). However, the physical form of beauty “takes us only as far as the threshold” and afterwards, the beautiful form of Christ is experienced (Balthasar 65). So, for example, this picture would have beauty grounded in a reality while this piece of art would be beautiful only. According to Balthasar, worldly beauty (which includes the beauty of art and the beauty of worldly forms) and the beauty of God are equal in their vivacity and magnificence but Godly and Christian beauty are grounded in a solid reality.

Balthasar, like Plato, emphasizes the fact that worldly beauty can lead us astray from what is real (Balthasar 124). Therefore, Balthasar’s philosophy has platonic overtones but also prioritizes beauty in that the experience of beauty (both of aesthetic and art forms and of spiritual forms) as integral to the Christian experience. However, by broadening the meaning of beauty beyond just physical art, Balthasar connects sensible art to other valuable things, such as a human being or God.

According to Delattre, Jonathan Edwards, in a similar manner, finds beauty in different forms other than art: beauty is a characteristic of God, human spirit, ethics, justice, and anything else that is good (Delattre 2). In order to experience non-physical beauty, Edwards describes a sense different from hearing, touch, taste, sight, or smell: that is a spiritual sense. This spiritual sense allows grace to be felt and ethics to be beautiful (Delattre 5).

Edwards also prioritizes the idea of sensual experience. Sensual experience inspires human beings to affections such as anger, love, or impatience; these affections then cause human beings to will and then to act. Edwards states that “the affections of men are the springs of the motion: take away all love and hatred, all hope and fear, all anger, zeal and affectionate desire, and the world would be, in a great measure, motionless and dead” (Delattre 6).

Edwards’ interpretation allows the experience of physical beauty, say an image of a gorgeous natural waterfall, to be connected with spiritual experiences of “beautiful” ideas, such as when one realizes the beauty of democracy. Both are things that create affections in a human being and thereby motivate our actions. In this way, physical beauty is given a more prominent and important role in Edwards’ philosophy: a beautiful sculpture can inspire people to give large sums of money to museums or a beautiful person can inspire irrational actions.

Theological perspectives on aesthetics introduces ideas such as rational order in art, Balthasar’s “form,” a spiritual sense, and a broadening of the concept of beauty. Broadening of the idea of beauty allows the beauty found in aesthetics to be connected with things like justice and ethics and God. This allows us to account for why we enjoy artistic beauty: we recognize in it the same sort of either order or “form” that we find in other things. By connecting beauty to things like justice and ethics, it seems that aesthetic and artistic beauty is naturally made subordinate to these other things. However, by rejecting the idea of mimesis, physical beauty no longer becomes a shadow or imitation but instead is meaningful on its own.

Prioritizing beauty alienates art that is not beautiful, particularly modern art. However, I think that focusing on Edwards’ idea of a spiritual sense or using Augustine’s theory about order, will allow us to describe ugly art. When we look at art we are experiencing something that could be good, like experiencing justice, or bad, like experiencing hate. What is interesting about art is that we experience it and recognize order in it that is similar to the way in which we experience important, meaningful ideas. Although a painting is just a collection of paint and canvas, we value and name it “good” in the same way that we might value and experience love. This is somewhat like taste, in that our experience of the artwork is connected to some sort of feeling of approbation. However, this view allows art to be kept in contact with the rest of our values by making the act of experiencing art similar to the act of experiencing values or meanings. I think that this concept could be very useful in aesthetic philosophy because it achieves meaning for the artwork.

Works Cited

Augustine. “Selections from De Ordine.” Trans. Robert P. Russell. Philosophies of Art and Beauty. Eds. Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns. London: University of Chicago, 1976.

Balthasar, Hans Urs von. The Glory of the Lord. Trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis. Eds. Joseph Fessio S.J. and John Riches. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982.

Delattre, Roland Andre. Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards: An Essay in Aesthetics and Theological Ethics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968.

Heidegger

2009-11-09T17:38:00.000-08:00

Just found this speech of Heidegger. It's the rectorate speech. I am still kind of heart broken that Heidegger may have been a Nazi. I think this is the speech. I got it from wikipedia. Enjoy.

http://www.eco.utexas.edu/~hmcleave/350kPEEHeideggerSelf-Assertion.pdf#search=%22%22The%20Self-Assertion%20of%20the%20German%20University%22%22

Comic Relevance

2009-11-06T18:14:00.000-08:00

I thought this was slightly relevant to our discussion of things today.

what if heidegger interpreted art like a 3rd grader?

2009-11-05T20:37:00.000-08:00

my friend teaches in an art gallery and has quite the amusing blog based on conversations had with his students: http://artoflooking.blogspot.com/

enjoy!

Nature

2009-10-15T17:27:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting article about how natural beauty affects us.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33243959/ns/health-behavior/
It states that even pictures of natural things makes us happy. This could correspond to Kant's argument about nature being connected to this feeling of pleasure that unites us all.

Presidential Taste

2009-10-10T18:59:00.000-07:00

Here is an interesting editorial about the selection of artworks that the Obama family made for the White House. It brings up issues of taste and the causes of taste (the author playfully gives a political motive to each selection.)

Have fun,

Allen

The Most Unwanted Song

2009-09-29T14:11:00.001-07:00

Since we have been talking about taste the past few days in class, I have been think a lot about how some of the things we actually like are really bad. A couple scientists took a poll and figured out exactly what people hate in music and composed the most unwanted song in America, which is actually pretty awesome.

Through the Looking Glass

2009-09-24T13:00:00.000-07:00

I recently came across this article, which outlines the research of the artist David Hockney (and others) into the use of various technologies of optical reproduction by many of the "Old Masters" of painting, and I thought some of you might find it interesting in connection with our discussion of Merleau-Ponty's "Eye and Mind."

Most of the article is devoted to explaining the optical devices (like the camera obscura, above) that may have assisted in the creation of some well-known masterpieces, as well as to Hockney's attempts to "prove" that these instruments were used in spite of the absence of documentary evidence. In other words, Hockney tries to demonstrate that these artists must have made use of such technological assistance simply on the basis of the artworks themselves, and they way that objects are arranged spatially within them.

While much of the article reads, to be honest, like a pitch for Hockney's book Secret Knowledge, in which the research behind these claims is presented, it still gives a nice synopsis of the ideas and a few clear illustrations of how these techniques can be seen in some familiar paintings. Still, the really interesting part of the article (to my mind) comes at the end, when Hockney contends with some of the critical responses that his claims have provoked since he introduced them about a decade ago. While he clearly does not want his research to be associated with the accusations of "cheating" that some people hear in it, and so defends the artists in that respect, he also makes it clear that, like Merleau-Ponty, he sees the paradigm of the optical perfection of perspective that reigned in painting from about the 15th century until the advent of photography (the perfection of the dream of mechanical production of images) as a falling away from the true task of the painter--and points to his preference for (surprise, surprise)...

Cezanne's way of placing these apples before the viewer to the detached, impersonal perspective offered by Chardin's (more technically perfect) peaches.

I'm curious to hear what you think about the article, so feel free to make use of the comments section. Anyone who's interested in this issue might consider reading Hockney's book (or others that I could recommend) as the research for a presentation.

My Old Roomie the Artist

2009-09-15T09:22:00.000-07:00

Hey guys. So as you may know from my comments in class, I really don't know much about the art scene around Memphis. I know that occasionally there are exhibits on Broad Street and that there is a Trolley Art Tour on Main. I have no idea when either of these occur because my old link to the art world graduated. I used to live with a girl named Alex Carter. Some of the art majors may know her but for those of you who do not she was an art major and is an amazing artist. My house was once adorned with her wonderful art and made to look like an art gallery. Now it looks like a few college girls who have no idea what to hang on the walls live there. I wanted to share with you all her work. It is very unusual but I really enjoy it and miss seeing it around the house. Unfortunately, as far as I know, her art is no longer around Memphis. She does have a web site though and I encourage you all to look at it. Her art is very interesting and different. Enjoy!

http://alexcarter.30art.com/

Lacy

Paper and Wood Art Exhibit

2009-09-09T11:49:00.000-07:00

There is currently an interesting art exhibit up at Christian Brothers in the Beverly and Sam Ross Gallery (the lower level of the Plough Library). The exhibition is displaying Martha Kelly's works on paper as contrasted by her husband's, Elmore Holmes, handmade furniture.

I just thought this might be an interesting exhibit for people to see in relation to Plato's thoughts on the three gradations of mimesis.

The exhibits hours if you are interested:

Mon-Thurs 7:45am -11pm

Fri 7:45am-4:30pm

Sat 12-4/Sun 3pm-11pm

Is There Objective Beauty?

2009-09-09T08:29:00.001-07:00

I wanted to re-post something from my own blog, along with the discussion I had with an anonymous philosopher. Feel free to read the whole thing at http://austinfreeman.blogspot.com (shameless plug)

I believe that beauty is indeed objective, though it comes to us subjectively. Beauty is an attribute of God, and as all Divine attributes is eternal, absolute, and universal. God's other attributes (truth, goodness, justice, power, etc.) are all the source from which we draw our conceptions of these things in the world, and I think it is the same with beauty. Just as all of these other attributes have an absolute (and thus objective) reality or fulfillment in God, so absolute (and thus objective) beauty can also be found there.

We see reflections of this perfect beauty in the world, in varied and diverse places, all of which give us a glimpse of that true, perfect beauty beyond this world (forgive me for sounding Platonic), in God. So the different reflections of this attribute, each impacting us in different ways and to different degrees, are all facets of ultimate and objective beauty. So while it may seem that beauty is subjective on one level, of we "zoom out" and consider God, we can see that objective beauty exists because it finds its absolute in Him.

I'll post the comments as comments.

Poets vs. Writers

2009-09-05T14:00:00.000-07:00

I know that within the context of the class we're mostly dealing with images, but in my work (both narrative and philosophical) I'm dealing to a great extent with the notion of aesthetics in writing, particularly when that writing is philosophical or indicative of some kind of thoughtful activity on the part of the writer. How can we differentiate the context from the content? Should there be a differentiation at all? What is the importance of the reader? These questions don't have objective answers, really, but they certainly bear examination.

A really important work for me is the essay "What is Literature?" by the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. I've embedded the essay here—I think it's definitely worth a read if you've got the time. The first few pages, though, are where Sartre deals most explicitly with how art—painting, music, poetry, prose, etc.—functions representationally. On page 30, in a turn that doesn't seem too out of line with Plato's thoughts about poetry in The Republic, Sartre notes that

For the poet, language is a structure of the external world. The speaker isin a situation in language; he is invested by words. They are prolongations of his senses, his pincers, his antennae, his spectacles. He manœveres them from within; he feels them as if they were his body; he is surrounded by a verbal body which he is hardly conscious of and which extends his action upon the world. The poet is outside language. He sees the reverse side of words, as if he did not share the human condition and as if he were first meeting the word as a barrier as he comes towards men. Instead of first knowing things by their name, it seems that first he has a silent contact with them, since, turning towards that other species of thing which for him is the word, touching words, testing them, fingering them, he discovers in them a slight luminosity of their own and particular affinities with the earth, the sky, the water, and all created things.

Not knowing how to use them as a sign of an aspect of the world, he sees in the word the image of one of these aspects. And the verbal image he chooses for its resemblance to the willow tree or the ash tree is not necessarily the word which we use to designate these objects. As he is already on the outside, he considers words as a trap to catch a fleeing reality rather than as indicators which throw him out of himself into the midst of things. In short, all language is for him the mirror of the world. As a result, important changes take place in the internal economy of the word. Its sonority, its length, its masculine or feminine endings, its visual aspect, compose for him a face of flesh which represents rather than expresses meaning. Inversely, as the meaning is realized, the physical aspect of the word is reflected within it, and it, in its turn, functions as an image of the verbal body. Like its sign, too, for it has lost its preeminence; since words, like things, are given, the poet does not decide wheter the former exist for the latter or vice versa.

What Sartre's getting at here, I think, is that poets don't occupy the same sort of philosophical space as prose writers because their approach to language is based in creation. "Suppose the painter portrays houses?" Sartre asks on page 27. "That's just it. He makes them, that is, he creates an imaginary house on the canvas and not a sign of a house." This is the function of the poet as well, to create an image rather than a representation of one.

I don't mean for this to be my presentation, but it's something that I've been exploring and I thought some other folks might find it interesting as well. The rest of the essay diverges from a discussion of art, less out of Sartre's dismissal of poetry than his primary interest in what literature means as a method of communication and an expression of human freedom. Let me know what you think.